Onesimus was an African-born slave who first introduced variolation (early inoculation) to the city of Boston and to the remainder of New England in the 1700s. Variolation was the initial way of immunizing people against smallpox. The process was undertaken by purposely immunizing an uninfected healthy person with infectious tissue or fluid from a person who had smallpox.

Through conversation, Cotton Mather, an influential minister in Boston who had bought Onesimus gathered information of how variolation was practiced on himself and others back where he was from in Africa. 

After his conversation with Onesimus, Mather took on researching all about variolation, through his findings he pushed for variolation to be practiced amongst the colonies and later on led to more acceptance of this practice. Onesimus played a key role in the understanding and what are now known as vaccines.

Timeline of Events

1706

• In Boston, a Puritan minister named Cotton Mather buys an enslaved West African and gives him the name, Onesimus – Greek for “useful”.

1716

• As the city is ravaged by Small Pox, Onesimus tells Mather that he’d had smallpox, and recovered. He describes how he had been inoculated, a practice that was basically unheard of in Massachussetts at the time. As Mather wrote, Onesimus said he “had undergone an operation, which had given him something of the smallpox and would forever preserve him from it.”

1721

• Mather becomes an evangelist for inoculation and is vilified by the medical community for believing the medical advice of an enslaved Black Man. When half of the city’s residents fall ill, Mather and Zabdiel Boylston, the only physician in Boston who supported the technique, inoculate 242 people. Only 6 of them died.

Learn more about Onesimus.

The Black Mind Behind the COVID-19 Vaccine: Lead COVID Vaccine Researcher, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett

Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, is a senior research fellow who’s spent the past 6 years working with in the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases’ Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory (VPL) 

For the past 6 years, her work has focused on coronavirus biology and vaccine development…[her team] made the first spike protein that was the basis for diagnostic assays, antibody discovery and vaccines. She’s been central to the development of the mRNA vaccine and Lilly monoclonal antibody that were the first to enter phase 1 and phase 2 trials in the U.S. As the vaccine unit’s team leader for coronavirus research, Corbett credited scientific groundwork for the mRNA vaccine’s sprint to clinical trial.

“The work we’ve done on SARS-CoV-2 is a proof of concept for that approach,” she continued. “I like to call it the plug-and-play approach, but the basic idea is that we had so much knowledge based on previously done work by ourselves and other labs that we were able to pull the trigger on vaccine development and start the ball rolling toward a phase 1 clinical trial.”

Communities of color have withstood a long history of abuse and bias by medical professionals and government agencies that has left them distrustful of government and healthcare institutions. These practices include experimentation on black bodies (living and the dead), eugenics and forced sterilization, and bias in pain assessment – among many others.  

Experimentation on Black Bodies & Forced Sterilization

• Antebellum South: James Marion Sims, known as the father of gynecology, conducts experiments on slave women without anesthesia
• 1835 – 1913: Scientists at the Medical College of Georgia steal the corpses of Blacks buried in a nearby cemetery  
• 1930’s – 1970’s: The Tuskegee Experiment
• 1932: “The Negro Number” – Margaret Sanger leads recruitment of Black Leaders & Black Churches to support eugenic discrimination

• 1950 – 1936: Black Women in North Carolina are forcibly sterilized at 3x the rate of white women

• 1960’s – 1970’s:  100,000 AA & HA women are forcibly sterilized via Medicaid funded programs

“Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis” (1932 – 1972)

Many of us have heard of the Tuskegee experiment – but a lot of us don’t know the details or the importance to vaccination efforts in communities of color. The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis has impacted why many communities of color feel hesitant in taking vaccines or engaging in many medical-related activities in relation to the government and healthcare system. 

A team of researchers from Tuskegee Institute conducted a study in which 400 black men with syphilis were deliberately left untreated in exchange for the promise of free healthcare. Even after penicillin was established as an effective treatment for syphilis, and informed consent was established as a hallmark of clinical trials, the men continued to go without treatment, and the study continued.

• 1932: Over 400 Black men with syphilis and about 200 men without syphilis (controls) begin with the promise of free healthcare for African American Men . Participants are deliberately left untreated

• 1947: Penicillin established as a highly effective treatment for syphilis, but participants were not offered the drug nor allowed to leave the study.

• 1968: Concerns raised about ethics by Peter Buxton and others

• 1969: CDC Panel Votes to continue the experiment


The Tuskegee study has had significant influence on Black Americans’ mistrust of health care institutions, especially as it relates to vaccination. But a recent study proves this is not the only culprit – but that current bias in the system must also be addressed.

The Continued Plague of Pain & Perceptions of Drug-Seeking

• 2016:
  • ½ of Medical School Students & Residents Surveyed in Study from Proceedings of the National Academy of Science indicated a belief that:

• • • “Black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than white people’s.” 
    • “Black people’s skin is thicker than white people’s.” 
    • “Black people’s blood coagulates more quickly than white people’s.”

• 2020: 
  • Dr. Susan Moore dies of COVID after complaints of pain are downplayed – “He made me feel like I was a drug addict”

To make sure unethical research practices like the Tuskegee Study do not happen again, many changes and procedures were put in place and are still used today to make sure the safety and health of study participants are prioritized. 

• 1974 – July 12, 1974, the National Research Act established the existence of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research to review biomedical and behavioral research involving human subjects. 

• 1976 – The Belmont Report is Published
  • Defined research principles
  • Voluntary Informed consent required 

• Late 1970s – Ethics Advisory Board was formed. They reviewed ethical issues of biomedical research and came up with the three ethical principles to guide human research – Respect of Persons, Beneficence & Justice

• 1995 – National Bioethics Advisory Commision created to review regulations, policies and procedures 

• 1996 – The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was developed in 1996 and became part of the Social Security Act.

mRNA Vaccine Involvement of Diversified Communities

Because of the increased risk of COVID-19 to minority communities, It was important that U.S. clinical trials of the COVID-19 vaccine enroll a volunteer population that at least reflects the diversity of the U.S. population, or more ideally—reflects the population of those at increased risk of COVID-19.

The NIAID-funded COVID-19 Prevention Network (CoVPN) is working with stakeholders to reach priority populations, including Native Americans, Black Americans (including African Americans), the Latinx community, people who are at higher risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 infection due to occupation, people with pre-existing health conditions, people living in assisted living facilities and communities experiencing health disparities.

The NIH Community Engagement Alliance (CEAL) Against COVID-19 Disparities is conducting outreach and seeking input from communities to raise awareness about COVID-19 and to address misinformation and mistrust about the pandemic and efforts to combat it. CEAL also is working to ensure that COVID-19 prevention and treatment clinical trials include racially and ethnically diverse communities most affected by the pandemic.

Vaccines have proven to be a significant achievement in the progress of health in general. More than 100 million cases of diseases have been prevented since 1924 because of vaccinations. A disease such as polio has been eradicated in most of the world today. The annual number of cases worldwide have declined more than 99.9% since 1988. If it was not for vaccinations, over 18 million currently healthy people would have been paralyzed from the polio virus. 

Viruses and bacteria enter the human body and begin to attack and multiply. This is what is called an infection, which can lead to illness. The first time the body comes into contact with a virus or bacteria it takes some days for the immune system in the body to gather and use the tools to fight it off. Once the infection is cleared out, the body has kept some “memory cells” to remember how best to fight off the disease quicker and more effectively if it comes in contact with it again in the future.

All vaccines used in the U.S. must go through an intense process of testing before being approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. After the production of a vaccine and its approval the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, FDA and healthcare professionals work together to monitor the safety and efficacy of the vaccines. There are three systems in place to monitor vaccines. Vaccines have to go through clinical trials where people from diverse backgrounds, such as age, ethnicity, gender, medical history & health status, volunteer to test the efficacy of the vaccine. To understand the right dosage, and monitor what side effects may come up. 

Types of COVID-19 Vaccines 

Currently, there are two types of vaccines available for COVID-19, messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines that include the Pfizer-Biotech and Moderna vaccines, and a viral vector vaccine, made by Johnson & Johnson:

mRNA Vaccines – mRNA vaccines have been developed and implemented for earlier coronaviruses like SARS and MERS. Instead of putting weakened or activated germs in the body like traditional vaccines, the mRNA vaccine teaches cells how to make a protective protein. Should the real virus enter the body, that new protein triggers an immune response that produces antibodies and prevents us from getting sick.

Viral Vector Vaccines – Viral vector vaccines piggyback the instructions to fight the coronavirus onto a separate and different virus, called an adenovirus. The virus is not alive and therefore cannot infect the individual receiving the vaccination. Viral vector vaccines have already been used to fight a number of diseases, including Zika, influenza viruses, HIV, malaria and Ebola.

Both Vaccines Had a Blueprint – The existing “blueprints” from previous vaccines enabled vaccine manufacturers to develop the COVID-19 vaccine more quickly. Dr. Toro notes that this was one of several reasons they were able to develop these vaccines in “10 months versus 10 to 15 years.”

Learn more about how the body fights infection.

How It Works:

The immune system is activated once we get a vaccine. The vaccine aids in the process of learning how to defend itself if it comes in contact with COVID-19, with the advantage of not having a real infection.

The COVID-19 vaccines do not contain a live virus.

• STEP 1:  Through a Shot injection to the arm, the vaccine enters the system
• STEP 2: Either the mRNA or vector instructions permeate the immune cells. Note: Neither vaccine becomes part of our DNA because their makeup is different and can’t change genetic code.
• STEP 3: Prompted by either the mRNA or the vector, the immune cells create the spike protein.
• STEP 4: Once the spike protein is made, the body gets rid of the original mRNA instructions and displays the newly created protein piece on the cell’s surface
• STEP 5: Immune systems begin the process of building an immune response and making antibodies, just like they would for a natural COVID-19 infection.
• STEP 6: Now bodies have learned to protect themselves against COVID-19 and we have an immune response ready to prevent getting infected with the real virus.