“Scientific conferences are being determined based on sex and race. It’s going to slow down medical progress, and it is also going to put physicians in the ER and the operating room who are not the top qualified.”
On September 20th, the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald spoke with Merion West editor-in-chief Erich Prince about her recent City Journal piece “The Corruption of Medicine,” which chronicles the activist left’s influence on medical schools and medicine more broadly. Her essay, which appeared in the summer, 2022 issue, asserts in its first paragraph that “Vast sums of public and private research funding are being redirected from basic science to political projects aimed at dismantling white supremacy. The result will be declining quality of medical care and a curtailment of scientific progress.” Mac Donald further chronicles how policies such as preferred admission by race, which accelerated during and after the events of the summer of 2020, have discouraged many qualified would-be doctors from pursuing the profession as well as how, in one notable instance, a physician’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding was discontinued due to too few black participants being present among clinical trial subjects despite the fact that the drug under development “was for a type of cancer that blacks rarely get.” Throughout their conversation, Ms. Mac Donald and Mr. Prince discuss the extent of these new policies, including how black applicants to the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine can bypass taking the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) if they meet certain academic thresholds; the effects on funding, research, and drug development; and as to if things may reverse course.
This interview appears in video form:
Erich J. Prince
Erich J. Prince is the editor-in-chief at Merion West. With a background in journalism and media criticism, he has contributed to newspapers such as The Philadelphia Inquirer and The News & Observer, as well as online outlets including Quillette and The Hill. Erich has also spoken at conferences and events on issues related to gangs, crime, and policing. He studied political science at Yale University.
