booktv monthly in-depth program with best-selling author. washington the author of medical apartheid, deadly monopolies and recently published nonconsensual medical testing on african-americans, members of the military and prisoners. washington, you write that at age ten, albert is out of your life, out of o my life changed your life. how did that happen? >> i discovered a that particulr book and quickly began reading others. i was struck by his spirit of how he melded his christian beliefs, philosophical beliefs but most of all a life devoted

to service. i found that anus incredibly compelling and the kind of life that would be very meaningful and so he's a totally enchanting person and what's interesting is as i got older, it continued unabated, but i became a little bit more nuanced. people began pointing things out in the behavior and character that added to the fact that he wasn't perfect anymore than the rest of us are. but coming to that realization was quite a journey for me because at first i had an intolerance of being less and began to realize he's a human being as we all are and it's really important to not expect perfection because one will be destined to be disappointed, but

rather to appreciate people that not only achieve great things, but inspired untold numbers of other people to pursue a selfless agenda for their lives. so, i think he embodies the spirit of medical science perfectly. >> ..

>> the association and things came to a rude halt when i entered college i was only 16 years old and i was told universally by the professors and advisors forget medicine that is not a realistic goal i was told by several people that there are no african-american women doctors, it is not going to happen for you, of course that was a lie but i believe you because i'd never seen one in seven instant to railing. i was young and used to being encouraged an academic environment, i kind of exceeded to what they told me even though it wasn't true, of course i would never do that today, it was painful for me and more so i realized after a while it was not only my story it was happening to a lot of people.

>> you write during your career as a medical researcher somebody you, black people don't get organs they give organs. >> yes and the worst part in's large part, he was right. >> what is the back story to that? >> in my case i was working -- i was managing a poison control center at a hospital in upstate new york i love the job and we had been given old file cabinets by radiology. and i was emptying out and saw there was old patient files that had been forgotten in the cabinet and being me i read everyone, i will not say no, i was just being cures i read every single file but was appalled to discover the african-americans unique kidney transplants seem to be treated differently than the white

patients, for one it was social profile of the black patients had the word negro prominently written on every page of the social profile. to make no mistake that you knew you were reading the file of a black person and they mostly seemed thinner i found the two files that seemed identical, they were about the same age old are the gentlemen who were in kidney failure but they had bota been employed in both insured and they both have families and all the things that people look for in terms of social support and physical and financial ability and the father of the white patient was sick filled with testaments of his loving family and determination to live in his claim to an organ, the father of a black person was thinner and had a single mind actually in the treatment goal was to help them prepare for his imminent demise.

it was signed by a physician that i knew, a kind man who seemed embodied by the same qualities i first admired and albert sweitzer i was crushed and so disappointed of course that was not proof that race was a factor but it certainly was evidence so i talked with somebody who worked on the unit as an award clerk and she toldt me where have you been, of course black people are getting these organs are going to white people. just a summer i reviewed a book called the organ thieves in which an author had talked about one of the first organ transplants, from a black man into a white man and they detailed some of the history come some accurately, some not but basically he illustrated how

this person particular in other black people how their bodies were used to procure organs that would go to whites and the same thing happened in this country that was happening in south africa i remembered as a high school student hearing that christian bernard and his transplants but no one seemed to talk aboutro the fact that these organs are going into white a people from black people where was the law. there was that disparity in some argue that there still is. >> your 2007 book medical part tied, you quote mark and jim martin luther kingg from 1965 injustice in health is the most shocking and inhumane civil rights abuse, what was he referring to?

>> exactly that. doctor king had many concerns and we typically understand about his political concern but he was equally concerned about economic disparity and about healthcare allocation which he could recognize a systemic problem long before many people did, if you go back to a lot of accounts duringni that time you will sometimes find practice in the south that were very overtly racist but turning a blind eye to their own racial disparities but doctor king and his view was much broader than that he saw what was happening he saw the political and economic and the health struggles of people in this country were bound together and linked andy also saw how profoundly cruelly that was and how it would dictate a person

entire life and their medical being determined by their race or the fact that they were poor. >> medical the party is still a bestseller, you open the book with the story about doctor james marion sims, who was he? >> i talk about doctor sims early in the introduction, he is important to me because he's so well up a demised classic figure in american medicine, and american medicine we decided and designated certain people as american heroes, these are people who we say have achieved great things, when we use the term hero we are not concerned about how they achieve these things, only that we think they achieve them because sometimes were actually wrong and were describing thehe achievement and is a perfect example of that and it's a perfect example of a

doctor viewed one way by blacks and one way by whites, many white people viewed him as an american gynecology and praised him as someone who treated in slaves and elected him as american medical association and for a lot of white women he was viewed for a long time and they were told to view him as a savior and he was able to cure a devastating complication of childbirth and the victorian era, i won't go into gory detail but is a horrible complication and it results in a woman being incompetent of urine and feces and living her life in perpetual pain and infection, is a horrible situation and doctor sims learned i how to close surgically but he did it and predicated on the african-american women so we took black women, only black women and he experimented on them for years trying different

ways of closing which meant he was experimenting on them doing surgeries on them that were painful and intimate with members of black women from the victorian era just as white women did and having someone operating on their genitalia frequently and in front of witnesses because doctor sims would invite friends and other friends to watch them come and work you was abusing the black women by subjecting them to them. it is horrible what happened but also horrible the way american medicine will treat this behavior and even today you'll find people defending doctor sims by claiming he used that and there was no anesthesia then but they were wrong, there was, the practices were a bit different today than one would have to test it and it would be written in medical journals, during the victorian era in 19

century the practice was often to experiment to try things out asking the patient yes or no if they p were white but not asking the patient if they were black procuring a person with buying, selling,ot renting, borrowing fm their s slaveowner and doing wht you wanted to do to their bodies. two different views, the one from black women enslaved by him and forcedd into painful with intimate surgeries and white women who could rejoice that he found a cure for this horrible consequence of childbirth. it's something that one finds repeatedly at the four centuries of history and repeatedly in american medicine you find the bodies of black peoplek procreating in use in service of

other people, white people without having any opportunity to say yes or no. >> you write the dearly held precepts of scientific racism found racist absurd but in the 18th and 19th century scientific racism was simply science, was propagated by the best mine in the most procedures institution. >> these institutions and these men, they were all men, their role was among many things, not only solve medical problems but also tell the world that americans in the world who african-americans were, you had the swish national at harvard one of the best-known scientist in the world one of the american

knowledge is the group of scientists to examine african-americans and made certain proclamations about them, they said african-americans had profoundly different bodies than white americans. in fact black people belong to different species. they were truly homo sapiens. they were missing a link betweea animals and human beings. that black people did not feel pain the way whites did this a primitiveus and simply unable to register paine. or anxiety or develop heart disease which back then was describeded as anxietyo african-americans were profoundly different being they were not just people with different skin or hair texture, these were beings who are not really humans and had diseases that white people never had, we know deficiency disease was held to be in infectious disease that black people had because they were dirty basically.

and even the complication that doctor sims experimented, that in fact had more slave women than white women because they were sexually, forget and dirty and the reason given a lot of illness like malaria, yellow fever, they proclaim that black people didn't die like white people did and they suffered less from malaria and the theories were really profound the idea that black people didn't suffer from heat stroke and they could workk long hours without becoming tired, you take these beliefs together and they constitute a profound apology to slavery. if you were confronted with vast deals in a subtropical environment that was widely held with the malaria environment where people would get malaria,

and with white people native americans might suffer heatstroke, what better than to be given a creature who didn't feel pain and didn't get heatstroke and didn't die from yellow fever and did not feel pain and would not have certain illnesses. it was a wonderful thing. what doctors were doing with these theories they were supporting enslavement and they continue to support it as enslavement changed suddenly with abolitionist with a lot of pressure in the other countries, indian enslavement and so the medical theory into african-americans. the real purpose is to support enslavement and more a medical support for the practice. , the horrible situation,

frankly you can still see aspects of it today. >> that's what i wanted to ask next, have you found proof of that mindset having those effects today? >> sometimes is really well documented, for example pain, they believe black people did not feel pain which was to justify forcing them intoin enslavement and to work in medical research, it's okay to cut the genitalia of african-american women. unlike the white women they're not going to feel the pain. and you believe that would be long gone, studies have shown consistently that we still believe that, medical practices incorporating that belief the most recent was 2016 university of virginia did a study and they

found that 50% of medical students surveyed the african-americans did not feel pain the way whites did they believe african-americans required more radiology, more radiation for treatment than white. these beliefs are right out of the 19 century, and they affect how people practice, they found a good proportion of doctorspl believe this so now we have doctors practicing in this country and medical students graduating thinking africans don't feel pain, that's a very dangerous belief. again it is straight out of two centuries ago i worry about the things that we are not tracking looking at.are not a balance now is our belief in racially diseases, it sounds laughable but we have instilled today, and the 19th centuries just that doctors believe black people did not die from yellow

fever, malaria, today they also thought black people only had diseases like africana and the petal media, these are things that i mentioned in the only affected and killed black people. today we believe that too, it's a very common belief, even today that sickle-cell disease is due to black people. it is not. the people who are at risk for sickle-cell disease is ancestors and currently grow up in an area where the mosquito is most common, it carries malaria in the trait for sickle health, not the disease but the trait and it's actually protective against malaria if you lived in the area where there's a lot of malaria and you have one for sickle-cell disease then you're more likely

to survive then people with sickle-cell disease or people who don't have it, it gives you fitness advantage. but it's a matter of where you grow up, it's not a matter of your skin color, it's what we treat in this country. and even coronavirus, the research began on itn in france, french doctors quite promptly published an article which they propose that they relieve the africans and people of african descent reacted to infections of all kind very differently than white people, biological more prism is still driving even though there is often no evidence at all or the evidence is very weak or poorly understood as malaria. so we haven't totally shaken this off for centuries later. >> your most recent book the

erosion of medical consent, you open that with a modern-day story of the doctor, who is he? >> the doctor practicing in texas who was treating patients and employees hydroxy, this medication that was first promulgated by donald trump twitter profound conflict of interest. many events, this was popularized in a lot of his political supporters were racist in ronald's applicable supporter of trump he's a prisoner proposed his nomination for president in texas so he began giving it to his nursing home

patients room the employees but many of the nursing home patients were too infirmed, too older to cognitively deteriorated to offer consent. you cannot have cognition problems if you not to give very well or very ill. and for that category. in those cases is typical, most cases to go to the next of kin, you talk to their children and a lawyer and whoever they designated. he did not do that he said i didn't do that because if i talk to family and i spend my time talking to families. he was totally and repent of the fact that he was not getting informed consent, he also claims he had been cured but when local health officials examine the

records, they found something different, there is not a good cure rate and the good numbers people had gone on to to become ill and die despite getting the medication. the larger question and the larger issue is for not consent in situations where it's been mandated or in cases where doctors or institution is more important for the expediency is more important than observing people's rights to say yes or no. discussing the book is the larger question, it's also the 1996 without people being aware with total lack of transparency, we have two larges that took away people's rights to consent to medical research and no

transparency, people simply awdon't know this but were seen more and more experiments conducted on people who never had the chance is to say yes or no to whether they want to be involved in medical research. and back in 1996, i'm still puzzled by the fact that so many people have so little information, that's why i wrote the book and people haven'te noticed, they've a pattern in this country unless we arrest this i'm afraid is going to continue in one day will wake up to find out that we don't have the right consent to many things that we would expect to have the right to consent to. >> harriet washington what is illegal and definition of informed consent? >> they are nearly identical, informed consent is more than

just asking someone to do a procedure or conduct an experiment and having them say yes or no, you have to tell them everything a person would need to know, making a reasonable decision and tell them what it's you propose to do, how you propose to do in detail what is a known risk, those will be risk you don't know and you can address those obviously but tell them the risk that you do no and the benefits that you hope will accrue in the research that cannot be totally benefit and it could easily be harmful and why it might be beneficial and anything that you know about might affect them, will they be tired, hungry, unable to drive and you can tell them about lifestyle changes that might result from it and what the purpose of the research is, it's very important and is been

violated in the past, it's hard to see how important that is until you see a violation. and to tell them that you are not finished. once as things change and new information emerges, tell them that to, say hypothetically you find a particular drug the hair of redheads to turn brown, you have to tell everybody that as well. everything that arises has to be shared with people so they're always in a state of knowing havething a person would towi know and you must also tell people no matter what they have signed or what they have paid they always have the right of the research study, that's also very important. all this has to be conveyed to people, it's a good thing in the regulation in section 50 that deals with human medical experimentation folder very clearly but in 19962 exceptions were passed to the law and that's when the problems stand,

the research in this countries they don't even have to tell you you are in a research study. >> harriet washington right since 1996 being forced to participate in medical research has been permitted under the federal code of regulation provided certain conditions are met, what are the conditions? >> the conditions are various, one of them says that after testing a new treatment. it's a strange condition, testing a new treatment. you have to make a case that it's better than the existing treatment. the problem with that is the vague language in improving its these laws, what is better, what is better, what that results in my opinion is when you want to

test something new there is a full on press to try to disparage the existing treatment the treatment that no one questions but now you start to say the problem with giving sailing to people who are losing blood is x yz. that is easily done and that will satisfy that condition. you often, not always have a condition that you don't have to tell people there in the study, you don't have to get their permission but sometimes you are told that you do have to tell people that live in the area where you're conducting the study that you're doing the study. so they're aware of the fact if for example they are shot in the chest, they could end up in situation where they have artificial blood pumped into the body. you just tell people that in general so they know. they used to call that community consent. but there's no consent involved

they change the name now the college community notification and the problem with that you go to areas in north carolina in the area of duke university and you had u a 5 million people in that region who could be affected but when they did the community consent they reached only a tiny tiny percentage ofny these people, a few hundred people and that's typically what happens the example was in seattle where at one point they told people the same thing that we arepl testing artificial blod and if you're an accident from a trauma victim, we may put the artificial blood in you without asking, they were diluted by request for exemption. andda the exemption instead of being a bracelet that you had to wait 24 hours a day every day, a bracelet saying i declined the study and in this case i declined the study they got somebody request for bracelet that they ran out and they ran out for one year.

during the one year, nobody could get exemption from the study. so it was not observed, that was not really observed even though they claimed ity was. what are some of the other conditions. those are essentially it, those are the important ones. in the commissions that rely on big language. . . . way. will be hard-pressed to find any treatment that doesn't have some flaws but that is exploited to denigrate and push for the experimental administration without getting nd permission. those conditions are imposed. host: we have barely scratched the surface. our guest this month is medical ethicist and scientist harriet washington. the author of several books

beginning in 2000 when living healthy withat hepatitis c. medical medical experimentation on black blackamericans from colonial tio the present deadly monopolies which we haven't talked about, corporate takeover of life itself and the consequences for your help and medical future came out in 2011. infectious madness, the surprising science of how we catch mental illness 2015. a terrible thing to waste, environmental racism and its assault on the american mind and tthe most recent book carte blanche the erosion of medical consent you can call in with a question or comment for the author. tubman 8200 in the east and central time zones, 748-8401 in

the mountain and pacific time zones. if you want to send a text of this is only for text messages you can send to (202)748-8903. if you do send a message include your first name and your city. you can also participate on social media just remember@booktv for facebook, instagram, twitter. twitter. and/or e-mail booktv@c-span.org. we will go through those during the program but several ways to contact. it leads me to think about henrietta.

>> guest: i couldn't hear you there for a moment. >> host: sorry. everything we talked about leads me to think about the henrietta story. >> guest: first of all i'm so happy it is now a household name. so many americans know what happened to her. in a the 1994 i spoke with her husband that is still alive and her family because i was deeply concerned that this woman had been suffering from ovarian cancer, had her cells removed and cultured and her husband was vehement and told me in no uncertain terms he refused permissionnc for her cells to be

taken and the hospital did it anyway. so it's been something that happens all the time they turned out toto be biologically very valuable in terms of the medium for the culturing disease. her family was lied to. her husband have taken over the objections and her children. i spoke with her son, david, many times at length. they found out by accident that

some others are being capitalized. john hopkins told them everything and even included the story in the textbook but all the others were denied and tricked the family by telling them at what point you may have the same your mother had so we need to get samples from you. that isn't why they wanted the samples. they wanted the samples because poor laboratory technique was causing the samples to be misidentified. it had become an international problem. they had a lot of samples and cultures that were

misidentified. when ios read the original medil journals, most came from people in part because researchers take their own families bodies and use them. there is language about the cells being rapacious and geaggressive and actually taking over other cultures if they were jumping aroundnd the laboratory but it's one of the aspects the idea that they were especially aggressive and not respecting

boundaries. it is a horrible example of how the family was lied to, very lucrative and yet there is no monetary value. that isn't true at all. if you fast-forward, the positive aspect of this is that they've worked with the family in order to moderate the distribution of the cells and include the family in theiro own rights.

one of the things people have no way of understanding or knowing is even those dramatic examples of the appropriation of cells and lying and withholding in, among other things and credit from the family, today we are facing a very different appropriation. it's no longer unusual cells like henrietta. now companies find large amounts of normal cells. fiprofit-making companies that have contracts with hospitals to take the surgical cells to acquire them from the hospital and then use them for medically valuable procedures and that

means all of us have cells that we are vulnerable to having taken without our knowledge and understanding what it meant when we signed thatat consent form. i noticed a lot of the writing focused on the monetary value, but when i talked to her family, that isn't their primary consideration. they were more concerned with the fact that their mother had been a global benefactor. she had given something important to american medicine and global medicine and it has been acknowledged that is what consumed them and what they sasked about. they didn't talk about the money involved in the cost although i think a lot of journalists first think about the monetary value andy focus on that but that

wasn't the families concerned, concern,their concern was as thn said i think they didn't want to know this was a black lady helping the world and he also told me a poignant story about how when i told him some of the things that transpired he wanted to see for himself. they wouldn't let him in so he was able to read information about his own mother. time has moved on and because of the patent system, it's now sometimes our own tissues that are on the auction block and that means more than a financial value and i think may be more importantly it is the lack of

control. you know what it's like to be given a consent form. most will sign it because they sneed the surgery and they may not notice that some of those have to do with the distribution of their tissues. it tends to have things like if they were ruthless they wouldn't want w them. because things are being discarded it doesn't mean that you lose all interest. you can choose to discard but you may be invested. to give one example if you have somethingma mandated by your

health status or if you are anti-abortion they do something that has to s do with preservin. so you can have an interest in the discarded tissues and i think that's something researchers would do well to incorporate in the decisions. >> host: you mentioned that you talked to the family in 1994 but it wasn't until about 2010 henrietta became a common name in the american culture because of rebekah's book. >> guest: that's right. >> host: did you think about writing this story earlier?

>> guest: i did want to write aboutin e the story. i wanted to write more about it and i was approached by the "baltimore sun." i wrote the piece and i was focused on the things i thought were most important to me and readers. i focused on the ethics of appropriating these tissues and the failure to acknowledge the important role of this african-american woman in medicine and of the distribution and things like that. d

i simply don't want to dilute that and they also asked me some pointed questions at least to me they were pointed and showed a cultural divide. in baltimore they've had several name changes and the african african-americans refer to as monument hall and the official name was something like that so i refer to it by the name that i should change it but then i began to realize most thought of it by that name there's a

cultural disconnect and it wasn't going to be bridged. i wasn't going to write about her dancing and wearing makeup because i thought that would diluteng the import of what uthappened and i wasn't going to impose. i would have been happy with both names but i wasn't going to impose the wrong name. it seemed like there was a cultural problem and so i don't want you to run the piece. they ran a piece afterwards and talking about henrietta it focused on her dancing so that was a piece they wanted to write. the focus of the editors i spoke with seemed to me to be the

wrong focus that would seem to undercut the severity of what happened ander the import. they also seemed intent on having family members saying certain things they were not saying so i realized it wasn't going to happen then that climate and so although as i said before everyone knows who she is and the claims made in the book and elsewhere about the lack of ethical regulations and scriptures during this time and the claim there were no medical ethics back then find some

doctors who could do as they wanted. that's not true. they made the same error and i pointed out in detail there had been w a number of court cases d roles cast that established the right to informed consent in hospital practice and so when people keep claiming these didn't exist this operates against the acknowledgment. so this is a way of exonerating researchers who chose not to observe them when it came to african americans. i would have written a very different book and i might yet.

>> host: hearing at washington as a lecturer in bioethics at columbia university, former page-one editor at usa today and a research fellow at medical ethics and harvard. first call comes from marianne in new york. >> caller: thank you. in terms of my own experience and seeing how terribly unbelievably bad elderly people get treated in hospitals, my question is does your book contain advice, not to go on and

on here but when i first met somebody that came back from colorado, it didn't mean anything about how they intended to do and should i carry them with me because what happened during a car accident or something if you are unconscious and brought to the hospital and they t don't know that you have them how do you get that protection thank you. that is an excellent question. and i talk about things like advanced directives and their

limitations. i detail this in the book but the problem is that it is hard in my opinion what can one person do. you are confronted not only with laws but also the lack of transparency. you are less likely to be able to actually see your loved one in the hospital. theve bottom line is this is a problem that i am convinced needs to be solved in the law. you can't ask p individuals to negotiate and navigate. giving or withholding care

without the input of family members, legal representatives, people that can is an excellent question that affects a lott of people. the erosion of medical consent the next call from atlanta georgia [inaudible] that's my husband, my late husband. what a guy. >> guest:

>> caller: i just felt a lot of black m men take advantage ad the cdc they try to get the word out, so what's your medical opinion? the mistrust of the medical system because you won't have to deal with aids and hiv and compared to the white counterparts they are 80% on prep so that's a disparity and no one can answer the question as a young black man living in atlanta and in new york city we have a high prevalence of hiv. why wouldn't you be on prep. >> host: have you gotten the covid vaccine or are you planning on getting it?

>> caller:, yes, i am already vaccinated thank you for asking. >> host: all right. you write black eye a true phobia is the fear of medicine. >> it is often mystified by history. it's interesting that we often talk about the fear of medicine among african-americans without also talking about the untrustworthiness of the u.s. healthcare system. these go hand in hand. it is a problem that black people want to avoid certain types of care to talk about the

belief and the consistence that african-americans don't feel pain the way whites do that means when black people in pain come to hospitals. in that case is the person afraid of care or the healthcare system. having said all that, there ise also the fact as gary points out in terms of healthcare they don't know when the h case is le that are african-american gay men are they avoiding prep or

not trusting it or is it less likely being held out to them as an option. they are designed to find out and can't know what's happening we have been reading all last summer daily headlines. when the data is published i got the original data and what i saw is that 10% of people in the majority and a 10% were african-americans. african-americans are 12.3% of the population.

that means african-americans were signing up. there was no whole scale abandonment. there was no refusal. we were right there. who is tracking white americans. how often were they signing the trials.or in reality it could be just as easily the lack of access because you seem to be following this and are knowledgeable about it let's assume it is as you fear and african-americans are avoiding it so than the question

becomes after you rule out access problems then it becomes a matter of trying to make sure african-americans understand the advantage to them and find out if there are any fears, find out what they are. you cannot ally them without knowing what they are and addressing them so it's a matter of doing a little research to find out what's going on. maybe it's something offered to them and we have to find out if they are avoiding it, why are they and then we can zero in on it. that's an excellent question. thank you for asking it. >> if you are intrigued at all by the conversation today, you can go to c-span shop.org and there you can purchase one of her-s books and part of that supports the c-span mission.

c-span shop.org. please go ahead with your question or comment. it is a common disease [inaudible] you might be right about that

latter point and that is what the family was concerned about when i talked to them in 1994. and there was much more of course. that is what they said. it's a question that i've been asking repeatedly about many people including medical researchers that attend not to get their due if they are african-americans and that is an excellent question. but in terms of this test, i am concerned what test is this. i have to say this is news to me. i had no idea that there were tests that were being administered on a racial basis is still. can you tell me a bit more about it? >> host: ron is gone. i apologize. t >> guest: i wish i knew what he was talking about. maybe he will want to come back or text us to let us know because it is something i don't

know about. and a lot of people know early in the design of blood storage, blood in this country and a few other countries was indeed being categorized byed race with blood from african-americans being separate and was based on racial superstition with no basis for it at all. but it's shocking to think that could still be happening today. >> (202)748-8903. for those who can't get through on the phone line you can try social media@booktv, facebook,

instagram, twitter, c-span.org and finally the phone numbers for the remaining hour with offer. washington. if you live in the east and central time zones 748-8201 in those in the mountain and pacific time zones. barbara in new york city good afternoon. >> in a local newspaper here, a woman wrote an article about vaccines and was reminding the workers that were refusing their shot and at the end of the article it is the duty of people to getf the shot if they have a

moral responsibility to participate in research you talk about murder in order to sell the body -- >> why did you pick up carte blanche? >> for the book medical apartheid. >> host: are you a medical professional in any way? >> caller: no i'm not. >> guest: the question about refusing the coronavirus vaccine. >> caller: there was an

article and she's asking the questions why are new yorkers still refusing to get the vaccine and at the end, she applies you have a duty to get the vaccine. >> guest: thank you. thank you. i will take the last question first. that is the only documented is a murder to sell the body the people doing anatomy in the hospital. the only document took place in baltimore and it has been well documented. there was a white woman in a black neighborhood involved with a black man and what is significant is this was well documented but people in the area claimed and still claim many black bodies had often been

used so it was never documented. in the responsibility accepting the coronavirus vaccine is a tricky one. there are people that argue there was the morals of stability and the point is the more people that are vaccinated by accepting the vaccination you're not only protecting yourself but other people. they may be too young or have

allergies to ingredients. also vaccines are not fallible. the more people are vaccinated,e vaccinated, the better the chance we have the argument is if you can be ventilated, you could be vaccinated to protect other people and that argument has an authority to it. goingd from that to say that its an imperative is quite a step and it should be undertaken. i am not equipped to say if it's something we should mandated by law. it's something wee should consider but i'm not sure that

we should do it. that is kind of a tricky thing. we love our freedom. how many things have we seen invoked in the name of demint speech that people in other countries wouldpe not see. so we do not take kindly to being told that we have to do something and yet that is a tool in public health i sometimes think we do not use often enough. i amte prepared to say wearing masks should be mandated for the simple reason that it is protectedd and right now how may videos can you see of people in

a whole foods refusing a mask and exposing other people before you realize the whole foods peoplee are not equipped to enforce. if it has to be enforced it should be by the government so this is a to rule that we need to consider using more often. people were being accused and just like the african-americans accused of not signing the clinical trials but did. we have had policies the separate african-americans from vaccination. we have practices that separate them from vaccinations and so

mandating it by law would be problematic because of things that are not their fault. we have a policy that dictates people that are 85 and older get priority then you have to face the fact that in this country they are all younger populations. it's twiceld the rate of those that are black in this country so when it privileges people that are 85 and older you are operating at against people of color. we should certainly be prioritizing older people. we also have to prioritize people of color that are also at a higher rate so we need better

policies. >> host: have you gotten your vaccine and what kind of research did you do? >> guest: i got my vaccine but i'm the first to admit although i'm happy there is one, they are effective and seem to be extremely safe, but how much research can one really do? they were generated more quickly and without the same meticulous data that we require for others but it also means we were relying upon companies own

certifications. but in my opinion it was the only logical step. i embraced the vaccine because look at the alternative. the longer people take to embrace the vaccine, i try to make it clear to people that arit's not 100% guaranteed that there will be no problems. that is an unrealistic goal one

of the problems of saying i'm going to wait and see what happens is the longer you wait, the more chance that you will be exposed to a variant. it's a dangerous thing to wait and see. it's very clear the best possible course is to take the vaccine. >> host: and mgh's massachusetts general? >> guest: yes, thank you for pointing that out. so taking the vaccine in my opinion is the only logical thing to do. i'm grateful we have that option and if it hasn't been made clear by now it's important to realize that's why we were in the trials despite the headlines to the contrary and that's why i'm

convinced that it is a lack of access. there's a lot of noise, headlines, anecdotal focus on african-americans who don't want to take the vaccine but i am convinced those numbers are dwarfed by the people that are having a a harder time getting . >> host: from portland we have a text regarding the question that ron asked. i've heard there are different test standards for things like diabetes and black people then there are for other races in determining whether someonere hs diabetes. >> guest: i don't know about diabetes but i do know there are algorithms. basically formulas used to determine whether someone is in a diseased state so yes you are right about that. they are also used to determine

what treatment should be given to people and race is factored in and should not be factored in. i think that we are beginning to see changes for example if you read medical journal articles you will see when describing a patient, race is immediately one of the first things they say about the patient. and my question is why, shouldn't you be explaining the patient, their symptoms, why do we need to know that it's an african-american rather than a white person. that is a flaw in our thinking and these algorithms that contain this flaw deciding that a diagnosis will be different if a person is black or white. i spoke with trisha williams. i was on a panel with her and she described eloquently what youed are saying.

she had an osteoporosis test and the doctor wasnd trying to run e results but it wasn't working. they couldn't get any response from the testing mechanism. they kept saying no response possible until her doctor decided to take the fact she was african-american out of the equation and immediately they had a value for her so yes something is being done. it begins with incorporating the fact the person is african-american in the beginning of the assessment and that is wrong. it shouldn't be there. all it does is skew the results and that is very problematic. i wish i could see evidence of this changing quickly but i see that it's changing slowly. >> host: rose from litchfield connecticut sends this. iy am a behavioral health

psychiatric nurse. one of the things i've noticed during the years of working on psychiatric units as persons of color especially black patients oawere given doses of psychoacte meds compared to the white patients that exhibited similar symptoms from the same diagnosis. that always bothered me. >> guest: yes. you are absolutely right. it's been a long time. but a long time ago i was on a psychiatric unit and i saw the same thing. african-american patients are more likely to be diagnosed with a serious mental illness. the same symptoms would give a white person a less serious diagnosis so symptoms seem to be much more dramatic illness than the same behavior, same symptoms of white people. they tend to be given more

higher doses of medications. when i ask a psychiatric nurse whyed it was black people were receiving higher doses she looked at me and perfectly serious she said you have to understand african-americans have more muscle mass and it's harder for them to metabolize it. i knew that was bs and device shocked to hear her say that but it's that same kind of thinking that i talked about in the 19th century with doctors deciding african-americans and the different diseases. also they believed the medications should differ.

maybe you and somebody else working in the profession can get some spirits to interrogate your own institution about what they want to continue doing this. >> host: have you considered going back to medical school or starting medical school? >> guest: me? i probably would if i were younger. >> host: norm is in eugene oregon. >> caller: good morning. i was diagnosed with polio and 22 months old. minded you it doesn't affect the

face but most of my body was paralyzed [inaudible] >> host: why do you say that? >> guest: >> caller: since september i have had several face procedures and prior to that from 22 months of age but a match continuously much continuouslyuntil i was 9-. most of the care was paid for by the march of dimes, so there was money to cover whatever it was they wanted to do with me. i was in isolation. >> host: is this just looking

back you think experiments were done or something you have proof of? >> caller: i was in isolation so i don't know what other patients were going through. >> host: how can she find out about her medical history? >> guest: it's t hard to prove the research without one's knowledge it is very difficult, but looking at old records it is a good start. the problem is old records are sometimes not available. they may have never been digitized. what i i found over and over agn in researching these events is that the records are lost. when i hear the records are lost i almost immediately have a negative reaction thinking maybe

nthey were lost and maybe they were lost on purpose but you have to go into it with your eyes openou and realize you may not be able to have access to these things however one approach might be finding a sympathetic ear in a journalist. as most journalists know, there can be small changes in the way it decreases the chance of success it's educating yourself. you know the institution where you are treated and where

surgery was done then you do the act and ask for information about your own case but you should bere able to find that about your own and it's a matter of finding when you can, what kind of procedures were done and that can also be very difficult. if you live in california, it is easier because they have the sunshine law that makes it easier to find out about the governmental activities. other states it is basically a fishing expedition that can take a long time. you mentioned i think in 2019 those the chances w might be better finding out precisely what happened. it might start with contacting thega institution and asking th.

they try to get information and say i'm interested in knowing more about the procedures. what more can you tell me and if that gets you nowhere then you considered doing the same thing, the filing of the freedom of information act. i wish you all the luck in the world and it can be done but again i would urge you to try to get the assistance of somebody that could maybe do these things in a more skilled manner than the rest of us c. >> host: it looks like we have ron from san diego on the line. what kind of medical tests were you talking about? >> guest: i was talking about blood tests. they have an algorithm when you take the test they use it to

determine that isn't the only way i also looked at the new england journal of medicine the racial bias and new england journal of medicine and there are aa lot of papers you can go to. >> host: we are going to leave it there and hear from harriet. >> guest: i wanted to know what kind of tests. and if there is one in particular that you were --

>> host: i apologize. i let him go h to get more call. i apologize to both of you for that. susan is in cambridge. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. you mentioned doctors that don't belong in the pentagon but one that i would really hope you at is the father of modern headache medicine and the pioneer in the psychosomatic illness. he worked for the cia added there are a number of books that i know that explained his involvement in the torture techniques and the cia that he then used. my brother was a patient of his

but he had a brain tumor that grew until it ruined his life. so his research on the psychosomatic illness and what he did was he took the torture techniques et cetera and used themat on who the cia records sd he knelt terrified and said that the headaches were gone butt thy didn't know if that's because he -- >> host: >> caller: they published a profile of him in 2016 i think it was. >> host: we are going to leave it there. anything you want to respond about? >> i'm very sorry about your brother.

that sounds horrific. there's other publications and i'm glad this has been exposed. this is my first time to ever call i believe. i am curious about the president of nigeria. i don't know him but i am curious about the doctors over in england.

could you tell me why he's going to e england all the time? >> host: what is behind your question? is it a distrust of u.s. medicine, is that what you're asking? >> caller: that would be the answer, yes. >> guest: i'm afraid i can't help you. i have no idea why he's preparing doctors in the uk to the u.s. i just can't help you there. we haven't talked about a terrible thing to waste. environmental racism and its assault on the american mind. what is the definition of environmental racism? >> guest: essentially it is the exposure to toxic substances. this exposure is racially

mediated. people are exposed to it at higher rates even profoundly poor white people are less exposed to environmental hazards them middle-class people. therefore the harm is racially mediated. a long black and hispanic children it is a scourge that robs them not only of their health but also the cognition but there's this profound illness and cognitive brain problems and brain damage inra e country due to the failure to

regulate hazardous materials effectively. >> host: would lead paint be part of the problem? >> guest: it's hard to locate anything in the body that is unharmed by lead. lead in paint and gas in pittsburgh and most major american cities. it's probably the iconic c soure of toxicity. we reference to this a little bit when we talked about

henrietta but in r this book you write that in 1980, colleges and universities secure 260 patents per year. in 2000, that number was 3,000 per year basically what happened in 1980 is businesses convinced congress people they needed to be able to exploit the universities and the government was supporting the university research. it was coming up with patents we

will create products and more medicine that is needed and generate industry. the government to set a good idea, passed the law about them we now have corporations that are basically controlling the medical research and they determine what drugs are developed, how much they will cost. they determine which ones will be discouraged and ignored.

that's why today we have for example no more drugs from malaria. we turned the control of the medical research is it because they are not subsidized necessarily by government? >> it costs more than many other countries because drug companies will charge what people are willing and able to pay to stay alive. it's no accident the most expensive are the most dangerous diseases.

that is what they charge. however, in the developing world that can have people pay that kind of money and either the drug company won't sell the drugs there or people go bankrupt paying for the medication. generics are made by the same companies that make the patented for-profit brand. and they are approximately 20% lower. the problem though is the same companies are making them and what will happen is that they are not that much cheaper and it

might doht the same thing but is advertised as better than the old drugs. they might work well or better than the new ones but it's for doctors under pressure to prescribe for their patients and so everything about generic drugs is that in some countries for a long time you had t to drs that had a different patent system. what is patented is the drug and another in india what you patent might be the manufacturing process. that meant basically you are a reverse engineer and sell the same drugs being sold in our country the more cheaply places

like nigeria, thailand where people couldn't afford the drugs and the wto passed some laws forcing the countries to respect the patents but they couldn't do it any longer so they have to provide the expensive drugs and they've written into it and the escape clause for the intellectual property and castigate them as doing something criminal.

the drug prices are being maintained at a high level and have nothing to do with the cost of the drugs. the rationale are not nearly as expensive enough to merit the priceser that are being asked of them. the price is one thing but it is also based on what people are willing t to pay and able to pay to stay alive. >> host: a lecturer at h columbia university, the daughter of two soldiers. one of the things we like to do with our officers is asked him

or her what they are reading and if this is something that interests you we will show you right now the books that some of her favorite books she's reading up above the world, unaccustomed earth, the warden by anthony, the beggar's opera, other store stories by samuel delaney and she is currently reading thomas mann. went through a lot of books there. you added a note to the producer and said i just finished reading 30 plus books in my role as a book critics circle board

member, though i am taking a break. that is a lot of books. >> guest: that is a lot of books but i'm lucky enough to be in a group of people that are fervent about books. we reinforce each other's sickness. so there youry have it. >> host: when we were reading that list and you heard what your favorites were, what struck you that you want to talk about? >> guest: arrow smith. i cannot completely explain but it's a fascinating book i read at least once a year. most years i have to admit to reading it more often. it's weird because it was published in the 1920s. sinclair lewis has given a prize based on this book and it's embracedt. more by scientists tn literature people which i find

really interesting and it's kind of straightforward and talks about a young man who becomes a medical researcher but he has a lot towards public health, private practice, a lot of the aspects of medicine that reveal something about his personality but also described by sinclair lewis in this perception of them that on the one hand seems to be true.

the events they have to decide whether he'sid going to give half the people on the island what he hopes is a cure, a vaccine, and the other half go unvaccinated and he does this and he justifies it but it's a dilemma that webu face today we are faced with are we going to use some people is basically test subjects to improve the health of other people, it is a dilemma and the perfectly in the 1920s in a way that you can

recognize today it is a wonderful book i cannot recommend it more. you will recognize a lot of things in the revelations and it is probably the best of the american medical landscapes that i've read. >> what i've noticed that he seems to make an appearance. >> yes. i think that he was realist with this sentence and one of the things he said that i applied when i wrote medical apartheid was that he talked about the fact that for a lot of people, medicine is a tragedy because you have to trust medical people, doctors and researchers and yet you don't trust them so

it is a horrible dilemma that people face every day. i think that he had a clear eyed view that doctors were highly skilled and idealistic but again, human beings like the rest of us. >> host: we have about 15 minutes left with author harriet washington and stephen cincinnati, you are on booktv. >> caller: thank you very much for letting me come on and speak. and my congratulations for a fabulous book. just amazing. there is a doctor that in 1985 was at harlem hospital and came up with a procedure called

navigation and turned upside down the whole issue of mortality and became the first president of the american cancer society, but the procedurere was also a member of the university medical school faculty as well but the procedures never really spread across the country. here in cincinnati we are still reluctant to use the procedure even though they are so effective. i wonder t if ms. washington kns about his work and knows also why people are reluctant to use the navigation approach. >> host: why are you familiar with harold friedman? >> guest: >> caller: i was impressed with the research showing that he transformed.

for other health treatments to get vaccinated as well. >> host: thank you. harriet washington. >> guest: thank you for bringing up doctor friedman. he's very depressing and. he saw things during the 80s and 90s a lot of people are only realizing just now. he also famously said if you look at the life expectancy it is the same as bangladesh. so you can't compare as though new york is cheated well. navigating the systems was

something he saw important. what was interesting about them, the reversal he was taking the point of view of the patient. the focus had always been from the system centered showing up for their appointments, are they complicit with taking their medications, but hef took the point of view of the patient. once he gets there, how does the patient find out or navigate, how does he find out how to get to the right clinic or the right caregiver? he recognized hospitals were largely opaque to outsiders and that a lot of the focus on patients not following through have to do with system failures

and that is hard to take historically from the point of view of american medicine. when the perspective often from the point of view of surgeon or doctor or status what was being done from their point t of view and to keep looking at the system and see how it might be failing and to be navigated and improved. i don't know the breeds of data but i know that anecdotally it seems to be more in the uk and places like london that kind of navigation has to take place.

but just like his success getting into the system successfully and seen has been mirrored by other people as well. i amby thinking of clive calend. when everyone was wringing his hands saying african-americans won't sign up or they will not follow through. but quietly he got many people in this area and beyond signing up to be donors, proselytizing, getting their friends to sign up. and another society president is african-american, he also had that same inverted perspective from the point of view of the patient.

how are we failing them and how can we better serve them. that seems to be the difference. taking that approach rather than how do we fit in the system which is admittedly that version is a hard thing to make both culturally and also how can i put this, the habit of practice has been set up for the convenience of the researcher and the statusus practitioner. and waiting to get people to invert that is a big ask. but it can be done. it's -- i hope the success that these people have had is going to militate for others paying attention and doing things differently. we can only hope. but that was a great thing to bring up. >> host: are we looking at

your office and home and is this where you do your writing? >> guest: this is where i do all of my writing and i have a huge bookcased to the left and another over here and my equipment. >> host: carte blanche just came out this year. when did you start and how much of it was researche" and writin? >> guest: it is a hard thing to tease out because the research is continual. so i really don't know. i planned to work on it for one year but the pandemic intervened and made a lot of changes iner ubpublishing so it was published about ais year later than it should have been which is fine.

i'mm happy with columbia global report. ittu was released to be a smallr book. this was more focused in a smaller but i'm enjoying that. >> host: are you ever surprisedd where your research takes you? >> guest: one of the larger more broad surprises i've had is i would say in 2002 i used to look on conspiracy theories differently. i would sometimes hear from people that would tell me something that sounded utterly fantastic and although i prided myself on keeping an open mind i sometimes had to react like this cannot possibly be.

this couldn't possibly be so. there were things that i found were true that i honestly didn't believe could have happened. and yet they have happened. so it's really expanded my idea of what people are capable of and my idea of my appreciation of how often when we hear stories and claims, and i include myself in that, the tendency is to judge the likely veracity in this case the person. i will think to myself here is a person that may not have that

much education. they may not be that sophisticated, so you are more likely to think conspiracy theory or something that isn't true, but then you hear from people that are credentialed and the bottom line is i have a better appreciation for this factor of the person's education, income, social status rather than how true what they are saying is. we would know more about history. we would know more about events if we e judged them based on the actual history than judging them based on the assessment of who the people are. >> host: just a couple minutes

with our guest left. go ahead. >> caller: yes, what a great segue. what you are talking about is a blindness to the inconsistencies. on the discussion to follow, to propose the covid herd immunity as public policy in the textbook definition [inaudible] trump covid genocide and by this intent, eugenic genocide -- >> host: allll right. we've got that. let's get an answer. herd immunity, genocide and president trump. >> guest: one of the problems about theories that are frankly

illogical and nonsensical as they incorporate some small degree of accuracy. they will take something that is actually real and interviews so much fiction into them. there is so much assumption. but it has that lingering credibility. that's what happens with the term herd immunity. it isn't what these people are talking about, and more to the point what they are talking about is very dangerous. allowing a virulent disease to rip through a community is suicidal. very •-ellipsis complicated, and if you want to know more about it, there's an excellent book called "play time," that goes into detail. but basically, when you allow a disease unchecked, you're risking, elevating the risk of all things.

for example, that disease, when it's going through a population unchecked will kill many more people. we've already lost between half to three quarters of a million people to this illness in the country. so how many more will die if we allow it to go unchecked. that is assuming that it doesn't remain more burial in which it probably will. if, for example, we have a variance that is even more dangerous, things will escalate. things may escalate that we can't design a vaccine against it more quickly. it is a suicidal supposition. and it's also frankly illogical. it doesn't make sense to a person that has no training or education. t people will find this kind of, or should find this kind of ideological. and yet it is being proposed.

it is really important to not rely on things that sound ideological but the experience of epidemiologists who understand the things that can occur. what is most important is ife yu ask someone like doctor anthony felt -- fauci, they will explain this concept, and yet you have people thanks to the internet being catalyzed with these dangerous rumors. i'm glad you brought it up, because you have to be careful not to listen to these things. >> host:. has been our guest for the past two hours on booktv. she's the author of six books. the mostst recent being "the

erosion of medical consent." thank you for your time this afternoon, ms. washington. >> guest: thank you. i'm very grateful to have been here. >> we knew that if we had a large number of men, very young men, to come into, unguided, and

socialized, that we would run into problems like this one. and then the response, the response is put on the women in poor neighborhoods. and i think that is -- it is simply outrageous. if you read the book you will see example after example. i've spoken to so many women that say i'm not anti-migrant. they want to display the same common passion displayed. they feel sorry for the people of syria and afghanistan.

they feel sorry for the people in somalia and elsewhere. they want to welcome them. there are so many volunteers ind so many of these countries who want to do good things for people in difficult places. most of them vote centerleft but also describe how this streets have changed, how the schools have changed. the continuous assault and obscenities on a daily basis and how the authorities leave them to themselves, because when they go to the city council to say look at what is happening in my neighborhood, they just dismiss them. and that is where the radical rights come in and that's where the radical islamists come in and all other extremist groups

with an agenda because the mainstream parties don't want to deal with the issues. >> visit booktv.org and search for the title of her i might