"Urgent, alarming, riveting, and essential." --Ibram X. Kendi
Carte Blanche is the alarming tale of how the right of Americans to
say "no" to risky medical research is being violated. Patients' right to
give or withhold consent is supposed to be protected by law, but for
decades medical research has been conducted on trauma victims--who are
disproportionately people of color--without their consent or even their
knowledge.
Harriet A. Washington, the author of Medical Apartheid, is again
exposing a large-scale violation of patient, civil, and human rights.
She reveals that the abuse first began in the military: In 1990, the
Department of Defense forced an experimental anthrax vaccine on ground
troops headed for the Persian Gulf. After a 1996 loophole to federal law
permitted research to be conducted even on private citizens,
particularly trauma patients, the military has pressed ahead to impose
nonconsensual testing of the dangerous and sometimes lethal blood
substitute PolyHeme among civilians, quietly using it on more than
20,000 non-consenting victims. Since then, more than a dozen studies
have used the 1996 loophole to give risky and potentially deadly drugs
to patients without their knowledge, especially people of color, many of
whom were already justifiably distrustful of racial bias in medicine.
Carte Blanche is an exposé of a U.S. medical-research system that has
proven again and again that it cannot be trusted.
