By Aaron Allen, The Seattle Medium
Dr. George Counts III, one of the leading infectious disease doctors in the country, grew up in a small, rural town in Oklahoma. As a young child Counts’ father abandoned the life as a sharecropper and moved his family to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in hopes of a better life.
“By 1945 it was clear we were not making it as farmers,” says Counts. “So, other relatives and my father were leaving the sharecropping business and moving to Oklahoma City to get better jobs.”
Dr. Counts, who is retired and now resides in Seattle, is a member of the task force in charge of battling COVID, and up until now his contributions to medicine and to his community, for the most part, have flown under the radar.
Unfortunately, the events of COVID have shed light on the important role that infectious disease experts like Dr. Counts plays in keeping our communities healthy and safe.
With the hesitancy of many African Americans to get vaccinated, the role Dr. Counts plays in educating our community is vital in combating this devastating pandemic.
In the early part of the 20th century the medical profession and the Center For Disease Control (CDC) began doing experiments on Black people by infecting them with syphilis. Known as the Tuskegee Experiments, these unethical experiments have made Blacks in the country very weary and untrusting of the intentions of the medical profession and the government.
As COVID has ravaged the landscape and vaccines have now become available the CDC is trying to impress upon the Black community to get vaccinated, which according to Dr. Counts is rather ironic.
“The two years that I spent at the CDC there was a national campaign to eliminate the disease syphilis from the country,” recalls Dr. Counts. “And the reason it was of interest was because that campaign was being run by the same division of the CDC that ran the Tuskegee Studies back in the 30s,40s,50s and 60s.”
“So, it seemed ironic that same agency that led the Tuskegee Studies was at that time leading the national fight to eliminate syphilis and I was asked to come and run it so I did that for those two years.”
Destined to make a difference.
Counts was one of a handful of Black students who helped break the color barrier in Oklahoma. At the time, Blacks were only able to attend the University of Oklahoma if Langston, a historical Black college in the state, did not offer a degree in the field of study they wanted to pursue. Many Black residents of Oklahoma were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with paying taxes to support a White school that most of the Black students could not attend. So, in 1953, Counts along with three other students were selected by their teachers to help integrate the University of Oklahoma by pursuing degrees in areas that were not typically offered at Langston.
“My teachers got together in the spring of 1953 to select four students to push to integrate the University of Oklahoma,” says Counts. “I had taken chemistry, so my chemistry teacher decided I would major in Chemical Engineering, which was not taught at Langston. So, I entered the University of Oklahoma in the fall of ‘53.”
Counts struggled his first year in college and was reluctant to face his parents and the community, who had scourged up enough money for him to attend school without having to work, when he returned home after his freshman year.
“After that first year I had really let my parents down,” says Counts. “My parents had only gone up to the eighth grade because that was all that was available to them and they were very disappointed.”
During the summer, Counts worked a construction job and thought to himself that there had to be a better way. This reality made him determined to return to school and do a better job academically.
Counts returned to school and discovered and fell in love with bacteriology. So, he changed his major and earned BS degree in Bacteriology in 1957.
His success in the classroom caught the attention of the department chair, who offered Counts a teaching assistant position which allowed him to go to graduate school at the University of Oklahoma.
In 1960, just before finishing his Masters, Counts moved his family to Iowa City to do research work at the University of Iowa.
During his work at Iowa, Counts was introduced to infectious disease research. His superior suggested he strive for a Medical Degree (MD) instead of the PH.D. So, Counts applied and was accepted to the University of Iowa Medical School in 1961.
Counts began working with patients during this second year of medical school, and by his third year he was working with sick people and really took a liking to taking care of people.
“The idea that the knowledge that you have you can use that knowledge to help them heal to make them better that feeling was almost like a narcotic,” says Counts. “So, I fell in love with taking care of sick people.”
Because of his success in Medical School Counts was honored and accepted into Alpha Omega Alpha, and Honorary Medical Student Society, and completed his studies and graduated in 1965.
Counts then knew that he not only wanted to do research but that it must also include patient care. Counts was the first African American to be accepted as a resident at the University of Ohio arriving there in 1965. According to Counts, the program was not the strongest so he applied to several infectious disease programs and was accepted to the University of Washington, which possessed one of the top programs in the nation.
After completing his training at the University of Washington, Counts took an infectious disease position at the University of Miami during a time when the specialty was relatively new.
“This new field of hospital infection prevention was just coming along,” says Counts. “And a new association of people devoted specifically to the prevention of hospital infections was being formed and I was a part of that new discipline forming a new organization called Association of Professionals in Infection Control (APIC) where I later became the national President.”
Counts later was offered an appointment in the Department of Pathology and ran the Pathology lab at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami.
In 1975, Counts was hired as the Director of Infectious Diseases at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, the same program that he trained in as a Fellow.
In 1982, Counts became the Director of the Bacteriology Program at Fred Hutchinson. Later, Counts was promoted to full professor and became the first Black Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Washington as well as being promoted to Member at Fred Hutchinson.
By 1985, AIDS began devasting the community and again Counts was asked to apply his expertise and in 1988 he joined the National Institute of Health in their National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease Department (NIAID), where he would report to Dr. Anthony Fauci in the summer of 1989 in the fight against AIDS.
Working at the CDC from 2000 to 2002, Dr. Counts worked to eradicate syphilis particularly finding the pathway to stop mother to child transmissions.
“With a big push and money it might be possible to eliminate the disease,” says Counts. “In many ways it was a successful campaign because it decreased the incidents of syphilis especially among Blacks and Hispanics and eliminated the transmission from mother to child.”
Although he retired in 2004, Counts was once again summoned last year, along with experts who were tasked to inform the public on the importance of getting the COVID vaccine.
“The fact that this vaccine was developed so quickly contributed to the concerns of some people,” says Counts. “For others, some in the Black community for example, concerns about the government’s approach to vaccines like the Tuskegee syphilis studies, although this is unrelated, that degree of mistrust still existed particularly among the Black community.”
Dr. Counts’ work in medicine and his contributions to the overall well-being of society is not without honor and reward. Dr. Counts help transform the culture of the CDC by bringing in more Black doctors and researchers and elevating its status to a point where a conference room and mentorship program is named in his honor.
“George went into the CDC with the hopes of changing all that Black people were afraid of in terms of infectious disease,” says Gary Thomas, a former teacher at Garfield High School, who has known Dr. Counts for many years. “He (Counts) went into the CDC with the mindset of not just being a doctor, but with the mindset that I am going turn around this whole paradigm, I’m going to make the CDC more responsive to Black people.”
According to Dr. Meredith Mathews, a Kidney specialist and who has known Dr. Counts since their young days in Oklahoma City, says that Counts is truly a one-of-a-kind gem that deserves all the accolades that he receives.
“It’s not just me who stands in awe of his accomplishments,” says Dr. Mathews. “It is his peers in the infectious disease world and it is his peers nationally. I don’t think I am really speaking in hyperbole to say that we have really a giant in the field of medicine who has been living in their midst.”
“The community doesn’t get to see all of the things that he has done and I believe they would really be proud if they, the community here and in Oklahoma City, knew of all of things that he has accomplished,” concluded Mathews.
