The attorney who won a lawsuit against the federal government for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study urges Black Americans to disassociate that infamous medical experiment from efforts now nearly a century later to inoculate people against COVID-19.

Fred Gray wrote “The Tuskegee Syphilis Study” in 1998 about his years in court to help the victims of the U.S. Public Health Service tests that started in 1932. The 623 Black men who thought they were being cared for by the U.S. were actually part of a long-term study to determine what effects syphilis would have on people left untreated. Gray took the victims’ case to court, securing a $10 million settlement and a national apology from President Bill Clinton in 1997.

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When vaccines began to be distributed to counter the pandemic, some Blacks nationwide said they would not take a shot because of their distrust of the government stemming from the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Gray and his wife have received the vaccination and he rejects theories that the federal government could again be targeting Blacks.

Fred Gray. (Corkythehornetfan/Wikipedia)

“That’s a misguided notion on the part of some people,” said Gray, who was the attorney for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks in the 1950s and ’60s. “You have to, number one, look at what the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was all about and look at the current virus. It wasn’t a virus involved in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.”

Gray said it has been nearly 90 years, his entire lifetime, since the Tuskegee Syphilis Study began. The study was instigated by a white county health officer, working with some Black medical professionals, who encouraged Black men to participate during the Great Depression. Many men volunteered after learning at churches and schools of the opportunity for free health care. None of them knew it was a study of Black men and syphilis, a disease they also knew nothing about. None of them knew they would receive no treatment for syphilis.

“You have that on the one hand; on the other hand you have a virus that started someway and has developed to be a worldwide disease that is killing hundreds of thousands of people,” Gray said. “Now they use proper medical procedures and have come up with a vaccine that is 94% or 95% effective, so where you have a vaccine that is that effective that could save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and then for somebody to say I’m not going to take it because the federal government started this program for Black folks back in 1932 and didn’t tell them about it, there’s simply no similarities between the two.”

Gray said he received the coronavirus vaccine on the first opportunity he and his wife had. He admits becoming exasperated when told initially he wasn’t in the right group to receive the vaccine. When he was eventually given the go-ahead, he was first in line at the Macon County public vaccination site.

“I don’t think anybody should use the Tuskegee Syphilis Survey and what the government did to the men,” Gray said. “The coronavirus vaccine has been properly tested by proper governmental agencies to be sure that it is as safe as can be. … What I’m saying now is there is no logical reason why anyone should use the Tuskegee Syphilis Study as an excuse for not taking the vaccine that may end up saving their lives.”