CLAY: We are joined now by Heather Mac Donald, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal, and the author of The War on Cops. Her latest piece in City Journal is about The Corruption of Medicine. Heather, you’ve been fantastic talking about all the data surrounding crime and cops in this country. But there’s a lot of eye-opening details in this piece all about the medical profession.

And Buck and I have talked for a long time. You would think medicine is the one place where you would say, I don’t care about anything other than whether my doctor is the most skilled possible practitioner of the medical treatment that I would need. But that’s not what is being focused on right now. Tell us what you uncovered as you examined the wokeness inside of the medical industry now.

MAC DONALD: Well, thank you so much for having me on, Buck and Clay. It’s always an honor and a pleasure. Yeah, you would think that, and far too many Americans have been rather blase in thinking that, oh, science is off-limits. We’re gonna remain meritocratic. We’re only gonna care about competent skills, the ability to heal people, to develop new scientific advances. That was a very, very naive assumption.

The medical profession and medical education now is been absolutely upended by three very, very troubling trends: the lowering of standards tore admissions to medical school and for passing students along into the profession, the transformation of the medical school curriculum to deemphasize actual science in favor of the usual woke indoctrination about white supremacy, systemic racism, and the indoctrination and enforcement of racial orthodoxies.

Both about the lie that the medical profession is systemically racist and about ongoing racial disparities and health outcomes. You can only attribute those disparities to racism. You know, if you want to understand how radically our country has changed, Buck and Clay, the AMA, the American Medical Association, along with the ABA, the American Bar Association, in the mid-twentieth century were the very epitome of mid-western Republicanism.

You know, they supported tradition, the establishment, law and order, competence. Now you have the AMA announcing that doctors have to dismantle, I’m quoting here — dismantle white supremacy and racism. You have the American Association of Medical Colleges saying that doctors have to show competence in order to be licensed in understanding intersectionality and their own privilege. And so, what was once, again, one of the pillars of American success and competence has now gone down, and the AMA sounds like a black studies department.

BUCK: Hey, Heather, it’s Buck. Tell us about the way they’re changing specifically the objective metrics, the MCAT, which is essentially the SAT for medical schools, right, but also even the way they’re having people in medical school with objective criteria and in residency too. Like, what are the ways they’re changing it? And also, what are the justifications for why, you know, you would put somebody who’s not as good at anatomy or organic chemistry into the top medical schools in the country?

MAC DONALD: Well, the name of the game in medicine and science and any kind of — in law, in any kind of meritocratic profession, in law enforcement, in policing today is disparate impact. The reason that we’re tearing down standards, whether it’s law enforcement standards in criminal enforcement or standards like expectations of knowledge is because those standards have a disparate impact on blacks and Hispanics to a lesser degree.

Blacks score much, much lower on the medical school admission tests, the MCATs, than whites, and they — the medical schools — use two completely different standards of admissions. Whites and see Asians are admitted with very narrow parameters what their — will be admitted for. A score on an MCAT that would be automatically disqualifying if presented by a white or Asian college senior would be an almost automatic admit if presented by a black or Hispanic.

And so, you have students that are brought into medical schools that are not competitively qualified with their peers and they do more poorly in medical school. It’s not their fault. It’s exactly what you’d expect if you’re brought in with academic skills that are much lower than your fellow students’. So, black students lag. And during the medical training there are other objective, colorblind tests that students have to pass through.

After the second year there’s something called the step 1 exams which measure a student’s knowledge of their clinical training, you know, their understanding of cell biology, of pathology. There again, blacks score about a standard deviation below whites. That’s a statistical term that just means basically big. Big and significant. And so rather than rethinking admissions and saying, well, maybe we shouldn’t be using these large racial preferences.

The entire medical profession has now gotten rid of grades on step one. They’re gonna go to — they’ve gone already to pass-fail in the hope of covering up these skills gaps. You have the medical honor profession society, Alpha Omega, that has now gone to a holistic assessment of medical students’ capacities, away from their actual knowledge. And it goes on and on. Basically, if you’re a white male in the medical profession now going forward, I don’t care how good your scientific quality is.

Your capacity to do groundbreaking research in Alzheimer’s or cancer or heart disease, if you’re a white male, you are gonna have a very hard time getting hired in a medical school, getting put into positions of power in medical research because the name of the game in medicine today is all about diversity. And, sadly, what this also means, Buck and Clay, is that if you’ve come into an emergency room and a member of one of these underrepresented groups that have been given preferences walks through the door, you have no idea if that is the most qualified doctor. He well may be. He may be the top in his class. The poison and tragedy of racial preferences is it puts a stigma on everybody within that class, and it is perfectly rational to be concerned about doctors in groups that have been given preferences throughout their careers.

CLAY: Heather, this also manifests itself in terms of the way that money’s actually getting spent. The NIH and the National Science Foundation are diverting billions in taxpayer dollars from trying to cure Alzheimer’s and fighting lymphoma to focusing on the fight against white privilege and cis heteronormativity. Is this real?

MAC DONALD: It is absolutely real, and it’s terrifying. We — medical science has been one of the greatest engines of human progress in history. It has liberated billions from crippling disease, suffering, premature death. We have now decided, oh, we’ve made enough progress. Now what we’re gonna do is using the medical profession and medical research to go after a complete, phantom lie, which is that American society is characterized by racism and that the medical profession is characterized by racism.

And so, yes, you’re absolutely right. The NIH is doling out millions of your taxpayer dollars to have these pseudo-researchers from gender studies fields look into intersectionality and cis heteronormativity. And doctors that are doing actual cancer research have to justify to the NIH what the value is of their research in aiding diversity both in their own labs… Of course, they have to show that they’ve got a diverse set of researchers working under them.

And a cancer and oncologist research told me, I spend more time worried about and trying to fill out my diversity statement than I do trying to understand and explain cell signaling and nematodes, which is a crucial aspect of cancer research. This is happening everywhere. A woman was conducting a major clinical trial for a cancer that very, very few blacks get. And so, her sample of people enrolled in her study were mostly white people. Her funding was yanked because she didn’t enroll enough blacks, even though they don’t get the cancer.

And so, you have one of the most bizarre aspects today in the medical field is that they have jumped on board the idea that race is a social construct, that there’s no such thing as racial differences genetically, which is not true. That there are races… Race is real. And yet they demand that these cancer researchers spend vast amounts of time trying to recruit a suitably diverse clinical trial population, which shouldn’t matter to them if race is not real. So, we now have a field that got where it is today, it saved lives by the scientific method, by using reason, by using debate, by challenging hypotheses.

Today, if you’re in the medical field and you challenge the idea that racism explains the higher black mortality rate instead of the actual reasons, which is higher rates of obesity, difficulty sometimes following doctors’ orders, lack of exercise, behavior issues, if you say that the profession is not statistically racist, your career is over. If you challenge racial preferences in medical education, if you say we are putting students at a barrier and we are also jeopardizing medical progress, you are also out. You are —

CLAY: Heather Mac Donald, fantastic piece. I would encourage everybody to go read it. It will be uplinked on ClayAndBuck.com for anyone out there who wants to grab it. Thank you, Heather.

MAC DONALD: Thank you so much, Clay and Buck. Always a pleasure.