- Check out this map of Africa.
Back then, most of this continent
had been carved up by European powers.
Belgium had a big swath of Africa right here,
where the modern day Democratic Republic of the Congo is.
What Belgium did in the Congo is shocking,
and hard to get your head around.
It's terrible, in fact.
But, Belgium's horrendous actions in the Congo
would lead to this.
- I would definitely take the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
- The FDA has just approved a third vaccine.
- Let's talk about the J&J.
- The Johnson & Johnson, coronavirus vaccine.
(speaking in foreign language)
- Johnson & Johnson's.
- Vaccine.
- The new Johnson & Johnson vaccine is a game changer,
for the fight against COVID-19.
It is cheaper.
It can be shipped without having to be frozen,
so it's way more durable.
It's made of really advanced sophisticated technology
that allows you to just get one shot of it
instead of the two doses from the previous ones.
- [Reporter] J&J's version requires just one dose.
- That's a big deal when you're trying to vaccinate
literally billions of people.
And so to understand how this vaccine
that is being rolled out by Johnson & Johnson,
a New Jersey based company,
how that is connected to Belgium
in the late 1800s in the Congo basin.
You have to understand the story
of how the sophisticated technology was developed,
and by whom.
- [Narrator] One man at the conference of Berlin,
walked away with his own private colony,
and showed what colonialism looked like at its very worst.
- [Reporter] This date marked the beginning
of white penetration into the black heart of Africa.
- [Narrator] African sleeping sickness
is caused by the protozoan parasite.
- [Announcer] Johnson & Johnson the most trusted name
in surgical dressings.
♪ In the language of love ♪
- Let me tell you a story of one of the most insane
and horrendous versions of European colonialism in Africa.
[Female Narrator] The 1880s and 90s,
were years of terrifying upheaval in Africa.
- It starts with this guy, King Leopold II,
he was the King of Belgium.
And by the way, this wasn't like 300 years ago.
This is like the mid to late 1800s.
Belgium, wasn't a big player in the colonizing game,
not like France and Britain,
but Leopold sort of wanted to be.
He wanted to be a big boy in peerless nation.
So he actually went to Spain and Portugal
whose empires were sort of declining at the time,
and offered to buy some of their colonial possessions.
They didn't agree.
So, Leopold decided to take things into his own hands.
Like literally on his own.
He himself, privately, would create a colony for Belgium.
Okay. So quick pause.
I just got an email from Morning Brew.
Which is a thing that gets sent to my inbox every morning,
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But it's not just like the sad, depressing news.
It's like actually interesting stuff.
I don't like going down the rabbit hole of trying
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So much of it is like noise and it doesn't help me
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Morning Brew just gives me a digest,
like a spark notes version.
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I feel like my mornings before this
were a little bit more scattered of like
what should I be reading this morning?
I'm not going to listen to like a 20 minute podcast.
What can I sort of breeze through?
Morning Brew just aggregates it all into one place.
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Let's get back to the story and talk
about what is going on in the Belgian Congo.
So Leopold decided to take things into his own hands.
With his own money and his own army.
He knew he would need some support for this
in terms of just like approval.
So he created an organization,
that he called the International African Society.
Leopold builds this organization,
and says that it's meant to be a research
and philanthropy organization.
With a mission to explore the world for good
and for science.
But soon, Leopold would use
this organization to get his wish of being
a big boy colonizer.
It was 1884 when a bunch of the European and Ottoman
and American powers who were colonizing Africa
got together and they decided
that they needed some sort of a unifying policy
of how they were going to go into Africa,
how trade was going to work.
But they wanted to work together
as they carved up the continent of Africa.
Leopold gets up at this conference,
it was in Berlin,
and he says, listen, I've got this organization.
I would love to take this organization of mine and go
and take over a huge swath of central Africa.
And everyone's like, you mean like Belgium is going to
go take over the Congo?
And he's like, no, no, no, not Belgium, me.
I'll do it with my own money.
And the European powers are sort of like, okay.
Like how much harm can one guy and his NGO do going
into Congo?
So Leopold gets his dream.
He gets international approval to go take over a swath
of Africa that is 76 times larger than Belgium.
He would call his new private colony, the Congo Free State.
Well, you know what happens next.
He doesn't improve the lives of people.
That was never his intention.
Instead, his army quickly gains control
over the local population
and starts to use the locals
to forcibly extract raw materials from the land of Congo.
Mainly in rubber, whose price was going up
during the Industrial Revolution.
And in ivory.
He would put these quotas on the local people
that they had to get a certain amount of rubber.
And he would instruct his army that if they didn't
bring back their quota,
that they were to go remove their hands or limbs.
This is everyone. Men, women and children
who are being forced to work for King Leopold
and getting their limbs removed
if they don't meet the quota.
So, Leopold starts extracting huge amounts
of wealth from the Congo.
And he uses this new money
to build big shiny things back in Belgium.
Including this big, beautiful park and archways
that I used to bike past all the time
when I lived in Belgium.
Or this beautiful train station in central Antwerp.
Wait a minute.
That train station looks kind of familiar.
(uplifted whistling music)
Yeah, that's me showing Henry the clock tower
in this train station.
I had literally no idea that this train station was built
on the blood of people in the Congo.
Okay, so I know you're wondering what is
this terrible story have anything to do
with vaccines and Johnson & Johnson and the pandemic?
Here it goes. Buckle up.
So while Leopold is doing all this terrible stuff
in the late 1800s, almost the 1900s,
something happens in neighboring Uganda.
An epidemic breaks out
of this mysterious disease called sleeping sickness.
This is what they called it.
They didn't really know what it was.
But Leopold catches wind of the fact
that there's a disease spreading
into the Congo where he has all these people,
and this giant operation for wealth extraction.
And he sort of freaks out.
He's like my whole wealth operation might get wiped
out by this random epidemic.
So, he decides to put out a cash prize
for anyone who can go down
and devise a solution or a remedy
to the sleeping sickness.
And then he starts to invest in actual researchers
and scientists, to go down to the Congo
and start studying tropical diseases.
To make sure that nothing catches him
by surprise and wipes out his operation.
Okay, well eventually the world catches wind
of all the terrible things that King Leopold II
is doing in the Congo.
And they start to mount pressure against Belgium
the country, and the actual government of Belgium
to put an end to this.
It's 1908, and finally the Belgian government
is like, dude, stop, like you're done.
And they officially take Leopold out of the driver's seat
and they annex the Congo for themselves.
And the Congo becomes an official Belgian colony
for the first time.
But these scientists and researchers
who Leopold set up to start looking
into tropical diseases, they didn't leave.
They stayed.
They kept doing this work and they actually started
to make some really important breakthroughs.
They establish an official state run organization
called the Prince Leopold Institute for Tropical Medicines.
An institution that was leading the world
in understanding tropical medicines
and teaching research and study about this topic.
This organization was based permanently in the Congo,
as well as, in Belgium.
Fast forward a few years, and the Congo officially
declares independence from Belgium.
- With political independence from Belgium
control of the entire Congo was turned over
to what is called the Central Congo Government,
with headquarters in Leopoldville.
- By this time, all of the holdovers
from the King Leopold days are sort of gone.
And now the Institute for Tropical Medicine
is actually like a legitimate institute
that is doing groundbreaking, cutting edge research
and study on all sorts of pathologies,
and viruses, and parasites and diseases in this region.
They're basically leading the world
in tropical diseases and understanding them.
They moved their headquarters from Leopold's house
in Brussels to the city of Antwerp where
that beautiful but terrible train station is.
And they sort of turn into like a school,
like an institution where they're training
researchers to then go out and work in the real world.
Okay. So here's where
it starts to really connect with modern day.
You have the Institute of Tropical Medicine,
which was effectively built
from King Leopold's operation in the Congo.
A lot of the researchers and students from
the Institute of Tropical Medicine
were graduating and moving on
and joining particularly one pharmaceutical company,
that was a Belgian pharmaceutical company,
that was down the road from
the Institute of Tropical Medicine.
This pharmaceutical company was called Janssen.
And as researchers from
the Institute of Tropical Medicine
joined Janssen Pharmaceuticals they continue to do
that groundbreaking work around the world.
Developing many of the medicines
that the WHO considers essential medicines.
- [Reporter] Vaccines, serums, medicines, and drugs.
- They continue to do work in the Congo, for example.
Where, just recently, they developed the vaccine
for Ebola in the Congo.
- [Female Reporter] A Belgian doctor was part
of an international team that was called to Yambuku
in the heart of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
- This is their old stomping grounds
where so much of this understanding of different viruses,
and parasites, and diseases was founded
during the King Leopold days.
But instead of the colonizing efforts
of the early 1900s, now these institutions are
actually doing really good work,
and actually saving lots of lives.
In 1960 Janssen Pharmaceutical,
which is full of all
these Institute of Tropical Medicine researchers,
gets purchased by
a New Jersey company called Johnson & Johnson.
- [Announcer] Made only by Johnson & Johnson,
the most trusted name in surgical dressings.
♪ In the language of love ♪
- And yes, this pharmaceutical company Janssen,
which is now a division of Johnson & Johnson
was the actual company that developed the miracle
COVID-19 vaccine that is saving the world today.
- [Reporter] Today, Janssen Pharmaceutical,
as part of healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson
announced this.
- The chairman of Janssen, by the way,
is a graduate of the Institute of Tropical Medicine.
Their long legacy in the Congo,
and their focus on scientific research
around tropical diseases is what gave them
the capability to be able to step up to the task
and create a vaccine for COVID-19.
In other words this, led to this, led to this,
led to this, led to this.
- [Reporter] The first J&J doses expected
to go into American's arms within 24 to 48 hours.
- Again, we think it's really important
for our country and the world.
- Okay. So I know this sounds like I'm doing
some sort of like exposé on Johnson & Johnson
and Janssen, and they're like dark past.
I'm not.
The work that they're doing today is amazing.
It is saving so many lives.
The Institute of Tropical Medicine
is an amazing public health institution
that does really really useful work
for saving many lives around the world.
And yet, when you trace back the roots
of why this institution exists
and the original motives for it,
they're pretty (beep) up.
- [Female Reporter] His 23 year reign was so brutal
that the population halved,
while Leopold and his men amassed huge personal fortune.
- What this story teaches me is just how impossible
it is to find an institution that wasn't founded
on some bloody dark past.
The country I live in, and the democracy that I am proud of
is founded on blood of stolen people from another continent.
How do I evaluate something that I think is good
when I really understand that the backstory
behind it is terrible, and bloody, and horrific?
The fact that this lifesaving game-changer vaccine
has a legacy that is based on a greedy horrific King
massacring a bunch of people in the Congo
is a really uncomfortable tension.
But if you look close enough,
it's one that exists in nearly everything around us.