French medical experts are criticized over comments about coronavirus in Africa.

A staff member at an Assemblies of God church in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, gave hand sanitizer to a worshiper in March.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

Two French medical experts have been accused of racism after they suggested that coronavirus vaccines should be tested in Africa because the continent was underdeveloped.

One of the experts, Jean-Paul Mira, the head of the intensive care unit at Cochin Hospital in Paris, said in a television interview on Wednesday that Africa made sense as a testing site because countries there “haven’t got masks” or intensive care systems.

He also compared the use of a potential Covid-19 vaccine to tests of experimental AIDS treatments that have been administered to sex workers in African countries, saying that people on the continent “are highly exposed and don’t protect themselves.”

The other guest, Camille Locht of the national research institute Inserm, agreed. He said that trials would be conducted in African countries to test a tuberculosis vaccine against the new coronavirus.

The sequence drew an intense backlash on social media, and the hashtag #AfricansAreNotLabRats was still trending on Twitter as of Saturday.

“Do not take African people as guinea pigs,” the Ivorian soccer player Didier Drogba wrote.

Mr. Mira apologized on Friday. The Inserm institute, where Mr. Locht works, said the video had been shortened and misinterpreted. The institute said that trials against the new coronavirus were conducted in Europe, and that if a vaccine was deployed, it would be tested in Europe as well as in Africa.

Reference: NY Times