As a number of promising COVID-19 vaccines have begun to make their way through human trials, researchers have insisted on the importance of ensuring statistically proportionate black and Hispanic participation in vaccine trials. As National Institutes of Health, Dr Francis Collins told the Washington Post recently, “If this is a vaccine trial that enrolls a bunch of 20-somethings or white college graduates, it will not give us the information we need.”

The pharmaceutical industry’s efforts to recruit black and Hispanic subjects for vaccine trials have been hobbled by controversies. Citing the collective memory of the Tuskegee experiments, many African Americans have expressed reluctance to participate in vaccine studies, while some have even expressed circumspection about the vaccinations themselves.

Readers may recall, Melinda Gates triggered a social media uproar, back in June, when she suggested that the high COVID-19 infection and morbidity rates among blacks merited fast-tracking vaccinations for African Americans, once an effective vaccine becomes available. A flood of critics in the Twitterverse condemned Gates’s remarks as racist, accusing her of treating blacks as “guinea pigs” and “crash test dummies.”