Michelle Obama Pandering To Ignorance

The bandwidths were ablaze on Wednesday about Michelle Obama’s “make-over,” but The New York Times added this to its story:

“By 2001, Mrs. Obama, married for nine years and the mother of two daughters, had taken a job as vice president of community affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center. She soon discovered just how acrimonious those affairs were.

Hospital brass had gathered to break ground for a children’s building when African-American protesters broke in with bullhorns, drowning out the proceedings with demands that the hospital award more contracts to minority firms.

The executives froze. Mrs. Obama strolled over and offered to meet later, if only the protestors would pipe down. She revised the contracting system, sending so much business to firms owned by women and other minorities that the hospital won awards.

In the mostly black neighborhoods around the hospital, Mrs. Obama became the voice of a historically white institution. Behind closed doors, she tried to assuage their frustrations about a place that could seem forbidding.

Like many urban hospitals, the medical center’s emergency room becomes clogged with people who need primary care. So Mrs. Obama trained counselors, mostly local blacks, to hand out referrals to health clinics lest black patients felt they were being shooed away. She also altered the hospital’s research agenda. When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.

Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease. ‘She’ll talk about the elephant in the room,’ said Susan Sher, her boss at the hospital, where Mrs. Obama is on leave from her more-than-$300,000-a-year job.”

It is a matter of public record in, “U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee,” issued by the Centers For Disease Control which unequivocally states the following:

“In 1932, the Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began a study to record the natural history of syphilis in hopes of justifying treatment programs for blacks. It was called the ‘Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.’

The study initially involved 600 black men – 399 with syphilis, 201 who did not have the disease. The study was conducted without the benefit of patients' informed consent. Researchers told the men they were being treated for "bad blood," a local term used to describe several ailments, including syphilis, anemia, and fatigue. In truth, they did not receive the proper treatment needed to cure their illness. In exchange for taking part in the study, the men received free medical exams, free meals, and burial insurance. Although originally projected to last 6 months, the study actually went on for 40 years.”

And then there’s this from the Huffington Post:

Blacks 'Injected' With Syphilis? Never Happened

“Rev. Wright said from the pulpit, in a video clip shown on Fox News: "The government lied about the Tuskegee experiment! They purposely infected African-American men with syphilis! Wright is wrong. That's not what the Tuskegee experiment was. In the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male," federal researchers refused to treat a group of black men who already had syphilis, long after a cure had been found. Instead, doctors treated these men like laboratory animals, studying the course of the disease over decades.

The Tuskegee experiment was the most shameful episode in the history of the U.S. Public Health Service. President Bill Clinton apologized on behalf of the nation in 1997. But the government did not infect black men with syphilis. To invoke the Tuskegee experiment to suggest that the government invented AIDS to kill black people, as Rev. Wright did... that dishonors the truth. There is no excuse for it. It must stop.”

And then there’s this from Snopes.com:

Claim: AIDS was created by the CIA
Status: False

“Part of the prevalence of the AIDS origin rumor pins responsibility for the virus on the CIA (or another group within the American government) may be due to deliberate Soviet misinformation designed to discredit the United States. An article charging AIDS was the product of US germ warfare experiments first surfaced in the Soviet newspaper Literary Gazette in 1985 and claimed the AIDS virus was created at a super-secret Army research laboratory in Fort Detrick, MD. The only source cited was the Patriot, a leftist Indian newspaper that, US experts charged, was a favored conduit of the KGB for its disinformation campaigns.

In 1986, at a summit held in Zimbabwe, what purported to be a scholarly paper linking the US military with AIDS was widely circulated. The authors did not have any expertise in AIDS research, but their offering was taken somewhat seriously by many who read it. The paper charged the disease had been introduced into Africa from Europe—not through homosexual practices or intravenous drug use, but by tainted blood supplies, which may have originated in the United States. Its conclusion was unambiguous: AIDS was let loose on the world by biological warfare experiments at Fort Detrick. That the rumor might well have been deliberately formulated by a foreign government at odds with the United States was an interesting curiosity.”

We are somehow supposed to be favorably impressed that Michelle Obama killed a research study at a center of learning to avoid reaching out with the truth to the black community around her hospital. Instead of spreading learning to those who need it --supposedly the mission of a university and its teaching hospital -- Michelle Obama seems to have pandered to ignorance.

Perhaps she avoided trouble for the hospital. It wasn't an issue worth fighting about, and fighting it would have required a lot of time and energy. But isn't that what community leaders -- and leaders of all kinds -- are supposed to do? Serve and empower people by giving them the truth, perhaps?

The Obamas seem to have no interest in the truth of Tuskegee, but in the hope that you do, here is a synopsis of the experiment:

The experiment began in 1932 and ran until 1972 in which poor black sharecroppers were denied treatment for syphilis. When it began it was with the beneficent end of determining whether the subjects were better off not being treated with the then-existing treatment methods, which were themselves often toxic. But by 1947 penicillin had become the standard treatment for syphilis. At that point Tuskegee could have treated all the men with penicillin or broken off some as a control group and treated the others. The failure of the program and the reason why the government conceded error and paid the survivors and their families was in denying the subjects knowledge of and treatment with penicillin, NOT in injecting them with syphilis.

Further, the failed experiment led to a significant review and reappraisal of biomedical ethics respecting clinical trials, which surely the University of Chicago medical school fellows know, and which Michelle should know about before blocking trials that could benefit the very community she claims to serve.