“Free the vaccine!”

Deadly Monopolies explores the contentious issues in modern biomedical research, highlighting how corporate control and patent laws have led to soaring drug prices and reduced innovation. The book delves into cases like gene patenting and biocolonialism, revealing the darker side of the medical-industrial complex. Washington argues that this monopolistic model retards research, puts patients at risk, and makes cures exorbitantly expensive.

Medical Apartheid details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals historical practices such as grave-robbing, unauthorized autopsies, and dissections, as well as the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of Blacks. The book also exposes shocking details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment and similar medical atrocities conducted by various institutions. It provides the fullest possible context for understanding the roots of the African American health deficit and the deep distrust of the medical establishment among Black Americans.