pinned the crisis on “low vaccination rates,” they had overlooked the “story behind the story.”
Head scientist Gregory Poland told Fact.org that there are myriad other possibilities than those posed by Kennedy’s film, including that vaccine doses might need to be increased for white kids, or that the increased antibody responses observed in Somali immigrant subjects might have resulted from being “exposed to rubella in refugee camps before arriving in the U.S., so the antibodies from the vaccine would have added to what was already in their systems.
I don’t doubt that perhaps the fact that this study has never been repeated to shore up its findings might be the result of medical racism and indifference to black well-being. Medical science and literature has traditionally overlooked or ignored black folks, omitting them from studies when developing live-saving treatments—or worse, callously using them as guinea pigs without their consent or knowledge for the benefit of white lives.