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Disposable Lives: Covid-19, Vaccines, And The Uprising, Matiangai Sirleaf

Faculty Scholarship

Two French doctors appeared on television and publicly discussed potentially utilizing African subjects in experimental trials for a tuberculosis vaccine as an antidote to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), denounced these kinds of racist remarks as a “hangover from ‘colonial mentality’” and maintained that “Africa can’t and won’t be a testing ground for any vaccine.” The fallout on social media was similarly swift, with Samuel Eto’o, a Cameroonian football legend, referring to the doctors as “[d]es assasins” and several others questioning the motives behind testing a vaccine on the African …