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 whose tracking white americans? how often were they signing up for clinical trials? are they signing up with the same rate of the population? were 50% of them? the question is why are we scrutinizing african-american behavior and so often calling it avoidant or aversive behavior when in reality it could be just as easily lack of access or the vaccine trials, right there and not being

acknowledged but because using to be following this really well, let's assume it is exactly as you feared and african-americans are avoiding it. then the question becomes after you'll out access problems because are they being offered at the same rate is whites 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, what they are you can ally them without knowing what the fears are and then addressing them. it is a matter of doing a little research because we have to find out what is really going on. maybe it's not being offered at the office was if they are avoiding a wire the avoiding it and we can 0 in on and try to raise the best where they should be. thank you for asking. >> if you are intrigued by our conversation with harriet washington today, go to

c-spanshop.org and there you can purchase one of her books, and part of the purchase price supports the c-span mission. c-spanshop.org. ron in san diego, please go ahead with your question or comment for harriet washington. >> caller: i'm calling about the racial bias in the medical profession. i recently found out, a blood test for blacks and they have a blood test for others. why is that? and concerning mrs. henrietta let, the lyrics, come they don't have any, let us know how

many diseases this lady cured or anything because to me she gave more for medicine than anybody that ever lived. >> host: that is exactly what her family was concerned about. >> guest: in 1994. as i began telling the things i knew about there was much more. that is what they said. she said she was a benefactor to the entire world, why don't they talk about this. that's a very good question, a question i have been asking repeatedly about many people including medical researchers who tend not to get there do if they are african-americans, they work and are ignored, excellent question but in terms of this blood test i'm really concerned what blood test is this? this is news to me. i had no idea there were any tests being administered on a

racial basis. tell me more about it. >> ron is gone. >> guest: i wish i knew what test he was talking about, maybe he will want to come back or text and let us know because it is something i don't know anything about. as 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 by race with the blood from african-americans being kept separate from white americans and charles drew was working on blood storage in the uk but didn't want to work in the us for that reason and it was based only on racial superstition, absolutely no medical basis for it at all but it is shocking to think that could still be happening today. >> if you want to text in be sure to include your first name in your city, 202-748-8903 is

the text number. for those who can't get through on the phone lines you could try social media,@booktv, facebook, instagram, twitter, email booktv@c-span.org and the female -- the phone numbers for the remaining our 202-748-8200. in the east and central times on, 202-748-8271 in the mountain and pacific time zones. barbara in new york city, good afternoon. >> good afternoon, two questions on this book, and a little local newspaper hero woman wrote an article about vacillating on vaccine and she was asking why new yorkers are refusing to get the vaccine shot and at the end of her article she makes the statement implying that it is the duty of

people to get the shot and in your book you talk about how individuals are told that they have a moral responsibility to participate in research. was a we have a duty or a responsibility to take the covid vaccine and secondly in your book you talk about a murder in order to sell the body to anatomists and there was one documented instances that. could you explain when and where that happens? >> why did you pick up carte blanche? >> caller: i saw that miss washington was going to be on your show and i rushed out and got it. i have her other book, medical apartheid and i just think she's wonderful. >> are you medical professional in any way? >> know, i am not. >> before you go repeat your

question about refusing the coronavirus vaccine. >> host: >> caller: a lady wrote an article called vacillating on vaccines and she is asking the questions why are new yorkers still refusing to get the covid vaccine. at the end of it she implies you have a duty to get the covid vaccine. >> guest: thank you. i will take your last question first. the only documented burkeing to sell the body to people doing anatomy in the hospital, the only documented burkeing took place in baltimore but it has been well documented. i don't remember offhand the particulars except it was a white woman living in a black neighborhood involved with a black man as what is

significant is this was well documented but black people in the area claim and still claim that many black bodies had also been used so the one with the black bodies was never documented. very concerning but it happened a long time ago and hopefully nothing like that is still being done today. in terms of moral responsibility for accepting the coronavirus vaccine that is a tricky one. there are people who argue there is moral responsibility and their point is the more people are vaccinated, the better protected our people who

cannot accept vaccination. by accepting vaccination against coronavirus you are normally protecting yourself, your protecting other people including people who cannot receive the vaccination for some reason, maybe their immunocompromised, too young, have allergies to the ingredients, people who cannot do it. also vaccines are not infallible was their well-designed and work willie well in most people, they may not work for certain people, certain individuals so the more people who are vaccinated the better chance we have as a community, as a country of avoiding illness all together. the argument is if you can be vaccinated you should be vaccinated to protect other people. that argument has moral authority. it is hard to argue with that but going that to saying it is an imperative, that we should force people to get vaccines is

quite a step and sometimes it should be undertaken. i am not really equipped to say if it is something we should mandate by law. that is something we should consider but i'm not sure we should do it. that is a tricky thing. the problem of course is that americans, we love our freedom. how many things have we seen invoked in the name of freedom of speech that people in other countries would not see as freedom of speech? we love our freedom and don't take kindly to being told we have to do something and there's a school in public health that i think we don't use often enough. i'm not prepared to say vaccines should be mandated by law but i am prepared to say wearing masks should be mandated by law for the simple reason that it is protective,

we know it is protective and right now we so often rely upon organizations or institutions to enforce it who are not able to. how many videos can you see if people in our whole foods refusing to wear a mask and exposing other people before you realize the whole foods people are not equipped to enforce this. if it has to be enforced it should be enforced by the government. this is something we need to consider using more often. in the case of vaccination i'm not quite sure especially because a lot of the claims about people refusing vaccines i find to be spurious. african-americans in particular being accused of refusing vaccines, just like the african-americans who are accused of not signing up for clinical trials but did, african-americans not getting vaccines now actually a lot of

it is due to lack of access. we have had policies that separate african-americans from vaccination. we have practiced -- practices that separate them from vaccination so mandating it by law would be problematic because you will end of punishing people for things that are not their fault. if we have a policy that dictates people who are 85 and older get priority then you have to face the fact that in this country african-americans, hispanic americans, native americans are all young populations much less likely to reach that age of 85. 90-year-olds in this country, twice the number of 90-year-olds or white as black so when you have a policy that prioritizes and privileges people who are 85 and older you are operating against people of color. we should certainly be prioritizing older people. we should be doing it but we

often prioritize people of color who are also at higher rates, high risk of infection so we need better policies, not punishing people for things that are not there doing. >> have you gotten your vaccine and what research do you do if you did? >> i got my vaccine but i'm the first one to admit but i was happy these mrna vaccines were found and produced very quickly, they seem to be extremely safe but how much research can one really do? they had of necessity the vaccines were generated quickly and without the same meticulous data that we require for other vaccines. we did not have the luxury of an extra 5 or 6 years so i

think we did the right thing not to do that but also means we were relying upon companies own certifications that their vaccines had a 96% effectiveness of efficacy, not quite the same thing. but the thing was in my opinion it was the only logical step. i was very happy we had a vaccine. i embraced the vaccine because look at the alternative? the longer people take to embrace the vaccine, i tried to make it clear to people it is not 100% guaranteed that there will be no problems, that is an unrealistic goal but a 100% guarantee that if you don't take the vaccine you are much higher rate of the coming infected, of infecting someone else, and falling victim to a

variant that could be much worse. i worry about the people who say they will wait and see. i talk to a doctor who has written very well about this at one of the problems with thing i will wait and see what happens is the longer you wait, the more chance that you'll be exposed to some variant that will be worse than people are experiencing now and get more ill and spread that variant so it is a dangerous thing to wait and see. it is very clear that the best possible courses to take the vaccine. >> host: that is massachusetts general in boston. >> guest: right. taking the vaccine is the only logical route, it is the thing to do. i'm grateful we have it and glad we have that option and if

it hasn't been made abundantly clear by now it is important to realize that african americans, like other americans, understood that. that's why we were in clinical trials despite the headlines to the contrary and that is why i am convinced it is lack of access that is hampering african-americans from getting the vaccine in greater numbers. there's a lot of noise, a lot of headlines, a lot of anecdotal focus on african-americans who don't want to take the vaccine but i'm convinced those numbers are dwarfed by the many people who want the vaccine and are having a hard time getting it. >> host: a text to you from washington regarding the question ron just asked, i heard there are different test standards for things like diabetes for black people than there are for other races in determining whether someone is diabetes. >> i don't know about diabetes. i do know there are algorithms,

formulas used to determine whether someone is in a disease state so they are right about that. they are also used to determine what treatments should be given people and unfortunately you are right in that race is factored in. it should not be factored in. i think it is changing too slowly but we are seeing changes. for example if you read medical journal articles you will see that when describing a patient, race is almost illegally one of the first things they say about the patient and my question is why? shouldn't you be describing the patient, what the symptoms are, what they are experiencing in, their own history, why do we need to know that is an african-american or white person, that is a logical flaw in our thinking and these algorithms that contain this

flaw deciding the diagnosis will be different if a person is black or white. i spoke with patricia williams, i was on a panel with her and she described very eloquently exactly what you are saying. she had an osteoporosis test and the doctor was trying to run the results and it wasn't working, they couldn't get a response from the testing mechanism. they kept saying no response possible into her doctor decided to take the fact that she was african-american out of the equation and immediately they had a value for her. it is something that is being done in american medicine, it begins with incorporating african-americans from the beginning in the assessment and that is wrong. it should not be there. all it does is skew results. that is very problematic. i wish i could see evidence

that this is changing quickly. i see evidence it is changing glacially slowly. >> rose send this. i am a dnt behavioral health psychiatric nurse, one of the things i've noticed in my work in the psychiatric unit is patients of color, especially black patients are giving higher doses of psychoactive meds compared to the white patients who exhibited similar symptoms from the same diagnosis. that always bothered me. >> you are absolutely right. it's been a long time but along, go i worked in the psychiatric unit in the emergency department and i saw the same thing. african-american patients are more likely to be diagnosed with psychosis, serious mental illness, the same symptoms would give a white person a neurosis, less serious illness. the symptoms tend to be

interpreted much more dramatically with much more severe illness than the same behaviors, same symptoms of white people, they tend to be given more -- higher dose of medication than whites. when i asked the psychiatric nurse why it was black people are receiving higher doses, she looked at me it was perfectly serious and said you have to understand african-americans have more muscle mass and it is harder for them to metabolize it. i knew that that was sheer bs and i was shocked to hear her say that but that is the same kind of thinking i talked about we saw in the nineteenth century's with doctors deciding african-americans had different diseases, diseases that they

were immune to, the they were of first to pain, also they believed that the medications given to white people and black people should differ, that some medications didn't work on black people at all and in others they needed a higher dose, more radiation for their cancer. it is complete fiction. it has no basis in fact and yet it is being done. it needs to be challenged and who knows, maybe you as someone working within the profession can get some kindred spirits to interrogate your own institution about whether they want to continue doing this. >> if you considered going back to medical school are starting medical school? >> guest: on a bit old bell. if i were younger. >> host: norma is in eugene, oregon. >> i'm a 74-year-old mostly

apache. i was diagnosed with polio at the age of 22 months old. polio doesn't affect the faceplate that is most of my body that was paralyzed and i feel like i was experimented on quite a bit. >> why do you say that? >> since september of 2019 i've had 7 face procedures. prior to that when i was younger i was in the hospital from 22 months of age, pretty much continuously until i was 9 years old. most of this 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. the theory was polio was contagious. >> is looking back you felt experiment were done on your is this something you have proof of? >> that is most of my question. how do i research this? i was in isolation so i don't know what other patients were going through. >> we got a good question there. how can she find out about her medical history? >> guest: it is difficult to prove that one has been used in research without one's knowledge, very difficult to prove. but looking at all records is really good start. the problem is old records are sometimes unavailable. they might never have been digitized. what i have found in

researching events is records are lost. when i hear that records are lost i almost immediately have a negative reaction thinking maybe they were lost and maybe they were kind of lost on purpose. the reality is you go in with your eyes open and realize we may not be able to have access to these things. however, one good approach might be finding a sympathetic ear in a journalist, perhaps a journalist in a local publication because they are practiced and skilled at getting information. the freedom of information act is something anybody can file but most journalists know that there can be small changes in the way you file it that increase your chance of success. rather than going into this on your own you might want to try to find an alley if you can get a journalist interested in this that could help you. if you can't then it is a

matter of educating yourself. you know the institution where you were treated, where surgery was done then you do a freedom of information act and ask for information about your own case. depending on where you live regulations might prevent you from getting information about any other case but you should be able to find out about your own. also a matter of finding out, when you can, what kind of procedures were done, experiments were conducted and that can also be very difficult. if you live in california it is a bit easier because california has the, quote, sunshine laws that make it easier to find out about governmental activities. other states, basically a fishing expedition that can take a long time. you mentioned procedure fairly

recently in 2019 and those i think your chances might be a bit better in finding out precisely what happened. you might start with contacting the institution and asking them. some people find it easier to contact the institution and try to get information in a non-confrontational way. i am interested in knowing more about the procedures you did on me, what can you tell me and if that gets you nowhere you can do the same thing, filing a freedom of information act compelling the institution to give you more information. i wish you all the luck in the world and it can be done. but i would urge you to try to get the assistance of a journalist or somebody who could do these things in a more skilled manner than most of the rest of us can. >> host: ron, what kind of medical tester you talking about? >> i was talking about blood tests. you go get a blood test, they haven't algorithm where when

you take the test, the algorithm to determine if you are black they have in our goal rhythm for blacks and one for others and that to me is racial bias. the way i also looked at the new england journal of medicine and the va is now, the question has been put to them. investigating it, racial bias, new england journal of medicine and a lot of scholars, you can see. >> we will hear from harriet washington on this. >> the algorithms are in play

but i want it to know what kind of tests. there are many types of blood test. if there is one in particular. >> host: i apologize. i let ron grow. i apologize to both of you for that. susan in cambridge, massachusetts. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. doctors who don't belong in the pantheon, one that i would really hope you would look into is one who is listed as the father of modern headache medicine and psychosomatic illness. he worked for the cia and there's a number of books that explain his involvement in developing torture techniques which he then used on migrant

patients i doubt would consent. my brother was told he had a psychosomatic illness but he had a brain tumor, 6 years until it ruined his life. so his research on psychosomatic illness, what he did was he took torture techniques and used them on migrant patients who cia records say came out terrified and the headaches were gone but they didn't know if that was because -- >> host: can you put a period on this? >> caller: a published profile of him in 2016.

>> host: there's a lot of information there. anything you want to respond to? >> guest: i'm very sorry about your brother, that sounds horrific. it also sounds as if doctor wolf, you said, been the subject of three books and other publications and i'm glad this is been exposed but i'm very sorry about what happened with your brother. >> host: gladys, baltimore, you're on booktv on c-span2 with father harriet washington. >> good afternoon to your guest, my first time to ever call i believe. i'm curious about the president of nigeria, i don't know him but i'm curious, he's been to doctors in england a couple more times and i am wondering why he hasn't selected the

united states for his medical problems. i don't want to know what his problems are too. could you tell me why you going to england all the time? >> host: what is the crux of your question, what is behind your question? is a distrust of us medicine? is that what you're asking? >> caller: i would say that, that would be the answer, yes. >> i a for afraid i can't help you. i don't know what he is suffering from or why he prefers doctors in the uk to the us. i just can't help you there. sorry. >> we cannot talk yet about "a terrible thing to waste: environmental racism and its assault on the american mind". with the definition of environmental racism? >> if you ask 10 people you get

10 different answers but i in -- the exposure to toxic substances whether industrial chemicals or heavy metals or pathogens this exposure is racially mediated in this country. people of color are exposed to it at much higher rates than people who are white. even profoundly poor white people exposed to environmental hazards than are middle-class black people. it is racially mediated although not recognized as such and therefore a lot of the harms resulting from that are also racially mediated the environmental racism we find that lead poisoning is a success story among white children in this country but among black and hispanic children it is still a scourge that robs them not only of their health but often their cognition over time. you got these racially

disparate sources of profound illness and cognitive brain problems, brain damage in this country due to our failure to regulate hazardous materials effectively. >> would lead paint be part of this problem? >> let us have a metal that we know of causes a variety physical illnesses. hard to locate anything in the body that is not harmed by lead but also the brain. it damages the brain so late in terms of paint, lead in gas, even lead lined water pipes that cause all the destruction in places like flint, pittsburgh, most major american cities. lead paint is probably the

iconic threat. >> your washington -- your book "deadly monopolies: the shocking corporate takeover of life itself--and the consequences for your health and our medical future" came out in 2011 and we referenced this a little bit when talking about henrietta let. in 1980 colleges and universities secured 260 patents per year. in 2000, that number was 3000 per year. they make hundreds of millions of dollars at colleges and universities, what happened? >> the colleges and universities make a few hundred million dollars for the pharmaceutical industry make $6 million a year. basically what happened in 1980 was businesses convinced congresspeople especially -

they needed to exploit the pets developed and universities. the federal government was supporting university research, the researchers coming up with a patent for molecules, discoveries that were potentially important but universities were not in the business of producing product so they said let us by these patents or rent these patents and we will create products, we will create more medicines that are needed, we will generate a lot of industry and instead of the patents lying around not helping anybody we will make them into medications. the government said good idea. passed the law and do that and as a result of the law passed in 1980 and some similar laws we now have corporations who basically are controlling the research, they determine what drugs are developed, how much the drugs are going to cost, which drugs are going to be discouraged and ignored and the

things universities once did corporations now do. corporations are focused on the bottom line. they will make a decision that will garner them the most money. they are not making decisions that will honor the best drugs and that is why today we have for example 20 drugs for erectile dysfunction and almost no new drugs for malaria. the latter is a killer but erectile dysfunction is a drug that people are willing to pay a lot of money for. in 1980, we turned the control of medical research from universities over to corporations and it was not a good deal. >> host: why do drugs cost more in the us than in other countries? is it because they are not subsidized by government? >> guest: drugs cost more in the us and other countries because drug companies will charge what people are willing and able to pay to stay alive. it is no accident the most

expensive drugs are for the most dangerous diseases. if you have a drug that might save you from dying of cancer the companies know you are willing to pay almost $1 million a year or your insurer is and that is what they charge. in the developing world you don't have people who can pay that kind of money at either the drug company won't sell it or people in the developing world can't afford it so in this country people go bankrupt paying for medication. the developing world people just die. >> host: what about generics? >> guest: a lot of generics are made by the same companies that make the patented for-profit brand and the thing is generic drugs are approximately 20% lower at least in 2001 when i looked up, 20% lower, the problem with generic drugs is

they are not the answer because the same companies are making them and what will happen is in this country they are not that much cheaper and the companies will come up with another drug that is on patent that might do the same thing but is advertised as better than the old drug. the old drugs might work perfectly well or might work even better for some people than the new ones but the new ones are the ones being pushed, the new ones are the ones that doctors are under pressure to promulgate and prescribe for their patients and so the thing about generic drugs is that in some countries, for a very long time, you had drugs that had -- countries that had different patents so for example in this country what is patented is the actual composition of the drug.

in another country, in india, what you patent might be the manufacturing process. indian companies reverse and engineer, much more cheaply to places like nigeria or thailand where people can't afford our drugs. the wto passed some laws forcing poor countries to respect western patents. now they have to survive the expensive drugs and even though the patent system has written into it and escape clause, it is perfectly legal for the us or any other country to say we are going to take the patent away from the company selling the drug for a lot of money. we are going to give it to a company that promises to make the drug for something less that people can actually afford

but when companies have done that the us has been quick to accuse them of intellectual property theft and castigate them is doing something criminal. it is frowned upon. our government and our companies don't want to do this and won't do this and castigate people who do do this. basically this escape clause is not being made available to us so drug prices are being maintained at artificially high level and the prices, let's be really clear, have nothing to do with the cost of the drug. the companies claim the rationale that drugs are expensive to produce and market and they are but they are not nearly as expensive enough to merit the prices being asked for them. so the reality is that the cost is one thing but the prices are based on what people are willing to pay and able to pay to stay alive.

>>. washington is a lecture at columbia university, she was born on fort dix, daughter of two soldiers. she's the author of six books and one of the things we like to do with our "in depth" authors is ask him or her what they are reading and if this is something that interests you we will show you right now the books that harriet washington, some of her favorite books and some of the books that she is reading. here are some of her favorites. arrowsmith, some clueless, the countryman guys, rudolph fisher, up above the world, unaccustomed earth, the warden by anthony trollope, the beggar's opera by john day, the word for world is for us by ursula le guin, stories by samuel delany and she is currently reading bud and brooks by thomas mann, went through a lot of books there that you added this note to our

producers that i just finished reading 30 plus books in my role as a national book critics circle board members so i'm taking a break. that is a lot of books. >> there's a lot of books but i'm lucky enough to be in this group of people talking about books, we reinforce each other's sickness so that you have it. >> when we reading that was to books and you heard what some of your favorites work, which one strike you that you want to talk about? >> guest: arrowsmith. i can't completely explain the fascination for me but it is a fascinating book. i read it at least once a year, most years i admit to reading

it more often and i find -- it is weird because the book was published in the 1920s. sinclair lewis was given the nobel prize based on this book but it is embraced more by scientists than by literature people which i find really interesting and on the face of it it is kind of straightforward. it talks about a young man who becomes a medical researcher but before he engages in pure research, his has a lot of faints to public health, private practice, a lot of aspects of medicine all of which kind of reveal something about his personality but also are described by sinclair lewis in this really wonderfully amusing but deep, sardonic perception of them. it seems on one hand to be a little mocking but also very true. hard to describe except

sinclair lewis head genius for inventing part of the american continent that didn't actually exist but when you read it is very recognizable and real and he did that for american medicine in the 1920s in a way that still resonates today. arrowsmith talks about things like one of the signal events is when there's an epidemic breakout in a tropical island, the protagonist has to decide whether he will give half the people on the island what he hopes is a cure, a vaccine and the other half go unvaccinated to serve as a control and he does this and he justifies it but it is a dilemma we face today, today we are faced with the dilemma, are we going to use some people in the world as

basically test subjects to improve the health of other people? a perennial dilemma and lewis captured it perfectly in the 1920 naps in a way we can recognize today. a wonderful book, can't recommend it more. you will recognize a lot of things and it is probably the best american medical landscape i have ever read ever. >> george bernard shaw seems to make an appearance. >> guest: a doctor friend of mine said shaw was a great doctor hater but i don't think he was. i think he was a clear idealist with a sardonic sense and there are a few things he summed up really well. one of the things he said that i applied to african-americans when i wrote "medical apartheid: the dark history of

medical experimentation on black americans from colonial times to the present" was he talked about the fact that for a lot of people medicine is a tragedy because you have to trust medical people, trust doctors and researchers with your life and yet you don't trust them. it is a horrible dilemma and it is a real american dilemma a lot of people in this country face every day. i think shaw was right on the money there. i don't he hated doctors. i think he had a clear eyed view that doctors were highly skilled and idealistic but again, human beings, flawed like the rest of us. >> host: we have 15 minutes left with father harriet washington. steve in cincinnati, you're on booktv. >> caller: thank you for letting me come on and speak and congratulations to ms. washington for fabulous books, just amazing.

there is a doctor that in 1985, harold freeman, was at harlem hospital, cancer surgeon who came up with a procedure called navigation where he helped people get from the community to cancer care, turned upside down the issue of mortality. he became the first african-american president of the american cancer society but his procedure -- also a member of the columbia university medical school faculty as well but his procedures never really spread across the country and here in cincinnati we still are reluctant to use his procedures even though they are so effective. i wonder if ms. washington knows about his work and knows also why people are reluctant to use his navigation approach? >> where you familiar with harold freeman? his research showing that in five years he had transformed

70% mortality rate into 70% success rate. >> host: are you in the medical field? >> yes. >> what capacity? >> caller: trying to help people to get vaccinated. >> guest: i know doctor friedman, i'm aware of his work, extremely important, groundbreaking work and friedman had again, he is very prescient. he saw things during the 80s and 90s but a lot of people realize just now. he famously said if you look at the life expectancy of a black man in harlem it is the same as a bangladeshi man.

you can't compare the health of people in new york as if all people in new york are being in well. navigating the system was something he thought very important. what was interesting about that, the reversal, he was taking the point of view of the patient. up until then the focus had always been from the system centered. is this patient showing up for the appointment, taking medications, but he took the point of view of the patient. how can the patient get their medication? is the patient getting to the hospital or not getting to the hospital? 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 patients and a lot of the focus on patients not following through or doing what they were expected to do had more to do with system failures than patient failures and that is a very hard view to take historically from the deck of view of american medicine when there are certain perspectives from the point of view of the surgeon or doctor of high social status. what was being done from their point of view? is the patient doing xyz? to have heard that and look at the system, it might be failing and need to be either navigated or improved, it is a seachange and it has been hard for people to make it.

i have noticed anecdotally it seems to be more the norm in parts of the uk when you go to places like london, more of an appreciation that navigation has to take place. just like his success in getting people into the system successfully, getting them seen and treated appropriately is mirrored by other people as well. i'm thinking of clive calendar, when everyone was ringing his hands and saying african-americans won't signed up for organ transplantation or follow through and won't be complicit with it but calendar quietly got many people -- he got african-americans invested in it. signing up to be donors proselytizing, getting friends to sign up and even otis

bradley, another society president who is african-american had that same inverted perspective from the deck of view of the patient, of the subject. how are we failing them? how can we better serve them? that seems to be the difference between them, taking that approach rather than how to make this fit in the healthcare system which is flawed so that inversion is a hard thing to make culturally and also just so you know -- how can i put this? the habit of practice, habitually, it has been set up for the convenience of the researcher, the surgeon, the high status practitioner and getting people to completely invert that is a big ask. it can be done. it is very successful and i hope the success these people

had is going to be others paying attention and doing things differently. we can only hope that was a great thing to bring up. >> i was looking at your office at home and this is where you do your writing? >> where i do my writing. and and it is my little space capsule here. >> carte blanche came out last year. how much was research and how much is writing? >> i don't know about research and writing. it is a hard thing to tease out for me. because the research is continual. i really don't know. i worked on it for about two

years. i only tend to work on it for one year but the pandemic intervened and made a lot of changes in publishing so the book ended up being published a year later than it should have been which is fine. i'm really happy with it, with columbia global reports and it was a bit of a relief to write a smaller book. i am used to writing these huge door stoppers. this one was more focused and i enjoyed that. >> host: are you ever surprise where your research takes you? >> guest: constantly. that is a good thing. i would worry if that weren't the case. one of the larger surprises i had was in i would say 2002 or so, 2002, i used to look on conspiracy theories very differently. i would sometimes hear from people who would tell me

something that sounded utterly fantastic and although i prided myself on keeping an open mind i sometimes had the reaction that this can't possibly be so and the more i have learned the more i have revised my thinking. now even when i hear the most fantastic things my reaction tends not to be this can't possibly be so as let's see what is going on, i will look into it and find it because there are things i found were true that i honestly did not believe people could have done, did not believe could have happened and yet they have happened so it expanded my idea of what people are capable of and my idea of -- my appreciation of how often when we hear stories we hear claims how often we, i include myself in that from our tendency is to

judge the likely veracity of the person. i think to myself here i am hearing from some person and they may not have that much education, may not be that sophisticated and more likely to think conspiracy theory or something not really true but then you also hear from people who are vastly credentialed and they will say something you know not to be true. the bottom line is i have better appreciation for how often being dismissed as a conspiracy theorist is a factor of the person's education, income, social status rather than how true what they are saying is. that is important to understand. we know more about history, we know more about events if we

judge them based on excavating the history than assessments of who the people are. >> host: a couple minutes left with our guest. michael, deerfield beach, florida, please go ahead. >> caller: great segue what you are talking about, bias and blindness to huge moral and logical inconsistencies. a question for you and hopefully a discussion to follow, to propose covid natural herd immunity, letting it just run through a population as public policy is textbook dictionary definition, no politics, pure meaning of words, textbook definition very definition of trump covid genocide and in this case specifically by intent eugenic genocide. >> host: we've got that, let's get an answer.

herd immunity, genocide, donald trump. >> guest: one of the problems about theories that are logical and nonsensical as they often incorporate some small degree of accuracy. they will take something that is actually real and infuse so much fiction into them and so much illogical assumptions, it has that lingering credibility. that is what happened with the term herd immunity. there is such a thing as herd immunity, it does exist. more to the point, when these people talk about, it is very dangerous. allowing of their roman disease to rip through a community is suicidal. verlyn's is complicated and if you want to know more about it

there's an excellent book by paul ewall, plague time because into detail. when you allow a disease to proceed unchecked you are risking elevated risk of all kinds of things, for example that disease when it is going for a population and checked will kill many more people. we have already lost between half, and 3 quarters of 1 million people to this illness in this country. how many more will die if we allowed to go unchecked? that is assuming it remains more virulent which it probably will because more verlyn, we have for example a variant that is even more dangerous, things will escalate. things may escalate to the point we end up with variant that we can't design a vaccine against or design more quickly. it is a suicidal proposition and also frankly illogical. it doesn't even make sense to a

person who has absolutely no training or education, laypeople will find this, should find this completely illogical and yet it is something that is being proposed. a lot of things are being proposed but it is really really important to not rely upon things that sound logical but rely upon the experience of epidemiologists who understand the things that can occur so what is most important is if you ask someone like doctor anthony fauci or any other epidemiologist they will quite clearly explain to you why it is a fallacious concept and yet you've got people, thanks to the internet being catalyzed to spread these kind of very dangerous dangerous rumors. i'm glad you brought it up because it can't be castigated enough. we have to be very careful not to listen to these kind of things and ignore experts.

>> host: harriet washington of columbia university has been our guest for the past two hours on booktv. she's the author of six books, the most recent being carte blanche, the erosion of medical consent. thank you for your time this afternoon, ms. washington. >> guest: thank you, very grateful. .. that is why charter has invested billions, upgrading technology, empowering opportunity in communities big and small. charter is connecting us. >> charter communications like

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