Thread by @BMore_Healthy

Charlie Chaplin did it better.

So, we joke, but this was a real, and terrible thing.
And yes, it was our doing, and we need to talk about it.

In 1899, Baltimore City Health Department Commissioner C. Hampson Jones, led racist efforts that targeted forced smallpox vaccinations of Black, Jewish, and immigrant communities in Baltimore.

Beginning on Pratt St, doctors would vaccinate “everyone in sight who could not prove he had recently undergone a similar operation”.

Without paper documentation, the only way to tell if someone had received a vaccine was via scars on their arms.

Vaccines were administered via shots after scraping away skin on people's arms, which would leave scars.

The vaccination efforts began again in 1913, this time accompanied by a $10 fine ($268 in today's dollars), and/or jail.

Both doctors and reporters who were covering the vaccinations described the communities in racist and disparaging ways, calling them things like “a very squalid lot of colored people.”

In 1901, Baltimore City Health Department commissioner James Bosley blamed the threat of smallpox on Black people from the south.

Again in 1906, Bosley stated stating “if it were possible to eliminate the colored death [rate],” Baltimore’s death rate “would be lower than that of several” mostly white cities.

Despite this racism by the white doctors in Baltimore and throughout the rest of the country, it was actually Black people that brought protection against smallpox to the Americas in the 1700s.

Onesimus, an enslaved African man in Massachusetts, had been asked by a Puritan minister if he had ever had smallpox.

Onesimus then described a vaccination method by which a small amount of pus from a smallpox victim was scraped into his arm with a thorn, giving him immunity.

Onesimus testified that the inoculation practice had been used for more than 100 years in his homeland, saving thousands from smallpox.

Despite tests that proved the method’s success (only 2 percent of vaccinated smallpox patients died, vs 14% unvaccinated), white people spread conspiracies that told lies of enslaved Africans attempting to kill their captors with smallpox.
washingtonpost.com/history/2020/1…

General George Washington, who had survived smallpox as a teenager, was a deep admirer of science and medicine, and had his entire army inoculated during the smallpox outbreak during the Revolutionary War.

Black scientists continue to lead the charge with vaccine work. Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett (@KizzyPhD), the scientific lead for the Coronavirus Vaccines & Immunopathogenesis Team at the National Institutes of Health was one of the scientists that worked to develop the Moderna vaccine.

Times have changed.

Vaccine hesitancy is no longer faced with jail time.

But Baltimore didn’t have its first Black health commissioner, Dr. Maxie T. Collier until 1987.

Racism has hurt the Black, Brown, Jewish, and immigrant communities in Baltimore.

The Baltimore City Health Department’s goal is to serve and keep safe all of our citizens, but we cannot do that without acknowledging and making allowances for the disparities caused by racism.

We’re not able to move forward without acknowledging the good, bad, and ugly parts of our history.

Racism has been, and remains, a public health crisis.

Huge thanks to Christina Tkacik (@xtinatkacik), who did research for this story for the Baltimore Sun:

baltimoresun.com/features/retro…