S1E68 / Medical Racism Past and Present / Vanessa Northington Gamble, Harriet Washington, Rueben Warren

EPIDEMIC with Dr. Celine Gounder

KFF Health News and Just Human Productions

Society & Culture, #Eradication, Medicine, #Covid, Science, Life Sciences, #Sarscov2, Documentary, #Coronavirus, #Covid19, Health & Fitness, #Smallpox

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2021

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"We have to have a conversation where we take people's fears seriously and try to figure out what is going on there." -Vanessa Gamble Black Americans are twice as likely to die from COVID as white Americans. Despite this, polls show that African-Americans are less interested in receiving the vaccine than other groups. But for people of color who do want the vaccine, inequities in U.S. healthcare are making access to vaccines more difficult. To get a fuller picture of the African American experience with vaccines and public health, we’re going to look at the history of medical experimentation on Black people. We'll hear why African American doubts about vaccines go beyond the infamous syphilis experiment at Tuskegee, how this legacy lives on today, and what lessons we can learn from these mistakes to help get more people vaccinated. This podcast was created by Just Human Productions. We're powered and distributed by Simplecast. We're supported, in part, by listeners like you. #SARSCoV2 #COVID19 #COVID #coronavirus

Transcript

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0:00.0	I've been explaining for 13 years that the Tuskegee study is not at all the reason why African
0:16.3	Americans are, quote, afraid of the medical research system.
0:20.4	We have to take people's fears seriously and try to figure out what is going on there.
0:30.0	Welcome back to Epidemic, the podcast about the science, public health and social impacts
0:44.0	of the coronavirus pandemic.
0:45.7	I'm your host, Dr. Celine Gounder.
0:59.8	In the late 1990s, Vanessa Gamble was giving a talk one day at the University of Illinois.
1:05.4	I must admit, I was a bit stressed out.
1:09.4	It was the day before I was to get my tenure decision.
1:15.7	Turns out, Vanessa didn't have anything to worry about, she got tenure at the University
1:19.7	of Wisconsin.
1:21.0	And today, Vanessa Gamble is a professor of medical humanities at George Washington
1:25.3	University.
1:26.7	But back then, she was at the start of her academic career.
1:30.0	It was the height of the HIV epidemic, and the African American community was hard hit
1:34.7	by the AIDS crisis.
1:36.4	In 1993, HIV became the leading cause of death in African Americans aged 25 to 44.
1:43.2	It would stay that way until 1996, when highly active anti-retroviral therapy for HIV became
1:49.4	widely available.
1:51.2	So I'm giving this talk, and I talked about how there were African Americans, some African
1:58.5	Americans who believed that HIV was introduced in the African American community.
2:04.0	Vanessa didn't think this was true, but as a physician and expert on the history of
	...

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