Black doctor giving a patient a vaccination

By Stacy M. Brown, Senior National Correspondent

In the looming shadow of a second Trump administration, the battle over vaccines and public health policy is being revived with unsettling vigor. Public health leaders, particularly those in African American communities who recall the long, painful history of medical neglect and systemic racism, are alarmed by the campaign to revoke approval of life-saving vaccines, including the polio vaccine.

This modern war on vaccines is led by figures like Aaron Siri, a lawyer closely associated with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s controversial choice for health secretary. It threatens to unravel decades of hard-fought progress that began when Black Americans demanded equitable treatment in the fight against polio.

The disease’s history remains linked to race and segregation, as the healthcare system once viewed polio as a “white problem.” Healthcare facilities, segregated and led by racist medical standards, advanced the misinformation that African Americans were immune to polio.Because of that, polio cases in Black Americans were not properly diagnosed.

The Myth of Polio as a “White Disease”

In the early 20th century, polio was perceived as a disease that primarily affected white children, transcending class lines. According to research by the National Library of Medicine, medical experts of the era, such as George Draper, propagated theories of racial susceptibility, claiming that “primitive” Black bodies were impervious to polio while “delicate” White bodies were vulnerable. The lack of data perpetuated those myths, and Black communities were deprived of doctors who could appropriately diagnose polio’s early symptoms.

The consequences of this neglect proved dire. Black families faced a segregated healthcare system where few hospitals would admit Black polio patients and fewer still would employ Black doctors and nurses. The Tuskegee Institute’s polio center, founded in 1941 with funding from the March of Dimes, was one of the few facilities dedicated to treating Black polio victims. However, with only 36 beds, it was unable to adequately address the national crisis.

Roosevelt, Warm Springs, and Political Embarrassment

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a polio survivor, founded the Warm Springs Rehabilitation Center in Georgia in the 1920s. Despite Roosevelt’s progressive image, Warm Springs maintained a Whites-only policy. Black patients were denied admission, even as they contributed to fundraising efforts for the center through the annual Birthday Ball campaigns. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” had been exposed for its racial injustices.

Faced with mounting pressure from civil rights activists and the political embarrassment of segregation, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) announced a major grant to establish the Tuskegee Infantile Paralysis Center in 1941, which treated Black polio sufferers and trained African American doctors.

The Fight for Integration and Health Equity

In the 1940s and, later, the 1950s, a shift occurred with the civil rights movement. Black leaders like Dr. John Chenault and Charles Hudson Bynum, the NFIP’s director of interracial activities, fought to dismantle the myth of polio’s racial exclusivity. Bynum’s advocacy included Black children in the historic 1954 Salk vaccine trials. According to Scientific American, the HeLa cells—taken without consent from Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman—played a crucial role in developing the vaccine, cultivated in a makeshift lab at the Tuskegee Institute.

Still, segregation persisted. Black children who received the Salk vaccine in Montgomery, Alabama, had to wait on the lawns of white schools because they weren’t allowed to use the facilities inside. At Warm Springs, Black patients were only grudgingly admitted in the late 1940s, and even then, they faced segregated accommodations and second-class care
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Vaccine Rollbacks: A Chilling Threat

Spearheaded by Kennedy, the anti-vaccine movement has returned and is threatening the fight for equal healthcare. Aaron Siri’s attempts to take back approval for the polio vaccine, which has saved millions of lives and kept millions from becoming paralyzed or dying, are a scary reminder of how easily progress can be lost. Kennedy’s appointment as health secretary and Siri’s influence point to a risky change in public health policy that could disproportionately hurt communities of color.

Experts in public health caution that weakening vaccines will allow avoidable outbreaks to occur. Lawrence Gostin, a public health law expert, described Siri’s legal strategies as a way to “hobble” agencies like the FDA, drowning them in litigation to prevent them from protecting public health. “This is a way to hobble a public health agency,” Gostin said in a published interview. “You can just drown them in paperwork so they can’t do their work.”

Lessons from Polio: Vigilance Against Medical Racism

The history of polio—from Warm Springs’ segregation to the overlooked contributions of Black scientists—offers a stark lesson in the dangers of medical racism and the need for constant vigilance. “Our racial disparities and health disparities were not invented in the past 10 years, and very often, they have been deliberately ignored,” historian Naomi Rogers, a tenured Associate Professor in the Program for the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University, offered in a Carleton College white paper.

Black communities today are suddenly faced with the same access, trust, and institutional neglect issues that hampered previous anti-polio efforts. Experts said the reversal of vaccines threatens to repeat historical injustices, endangering millions of lives and damaging decades of civil rights progress.

Those with political power are pushing the myth that vaccines are hazardous, recalling the pseudoscientific racism that claimed Black bodies were immune to polio. Civil rights leaders asserted that the stakes are significant, and history requires lawmakers to acknowledge the accomplishments of those who battled for equity and protect the public health victories they secured.
“When the first doses of the Covid-19 vaccines were available, people of color had less access to information and routine clinical care, which resulted in a big gap in vaccinations administered to whites compared to African Americans,” researchers at Carleton College wrote.