By Elham Kazemi, CIHA Editorial Assistant and PhD Candidate, University of California, Irvine
Today’s post delves further into the video that was aired on LCI (La Chaîne Info) in April and caused a great deal of backlash on social media. To recap: the video shows a conversation between two French doctors in which one of them, Dr. Mira, asks his colleague whether they should test the effectiveness of the BCG tuberculosis vaccine on COVID-19 first in Africa, “where there are no masks, treatment or intensive care, a little bit like it’s done, by the way, for certain AIDS studies or with prostitutes?” Dr. Locht, the research director at France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm), agrees: “You are right. And by the way, we are thinking of in parallel about a study in Africa using this same approach.” This interaction was met with immediate condemnation on the part of a wide spectrum of people, from the Ivorian soccer player Didier Drogba to Olivier Faure, member of the French National Assembly from the France’s Socialist Party. The French anti-racism group SOS-Racisme called on the Superior Council of the Audiovisual to formally condemn the remarks, but the Council did not denounce the statements. Twitter users from the continent also started the hashtag #WeAreNotLabRats in response. Although Dr. Mira apologized a few days later following the outcry, Inserm counteracted by arguing that the video was being “misinterpreted” while accompanying its statement with the hashtag #FakeNews on Twitter. The WHO director also condemned the comments as racist and a hangover from the “colonial mentality.”
In addition, both the statements and the reactions to them caused concerns among scientists in Africa that clinical research on COVID-19 might now be delayed or compromised because of the lack of trust on the part of African populations. For example, false claims about the death of children as a result of receiving COVID-19 vaccine circulated in Senegal as well as a false claim that the UN was planning to test vaccines in Africa. For our purposes, however, there are additional issues that need unmasking (pun intended), and that connect with previous work done here on the CIHA Blog. First, let’s take the interaction between the two doctors and discuss the problematic assumptions underlying their statements and the historical context within which such statements gain meaning.
