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The Current Transcript for June 15, 2021

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

When you're threatened with a terminal disease, you can't get scarier that and unless there is a light and then I read about all the controversy and I go, come on guys, do something. Do it now.

MATT GALLOWAY: People living with Alzheimer's are looking for hope. And many of them found it in a new drug approved in the United States last week, but is promising more than it delivers. In half an hour inside the controversy surrounding this expensive new drug and why so many are so desperate for good news. Also this morning, fighting about gun rights is an American tradition, and many believe those rights are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. But all Americans, at least when it comes to this, may not have been created equal.

SOUNDCLIP

It's nothing for a white guy to walk down the street with his rifle on his back and everything's just fine. And our Second Amendment is that when a black person does it[unintelligible] we're animal. What about they go stick up a store or something?

MG: The historian Carol Anderson's new book is about the U.S. Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. And in an hour, she's here to talk about the connexion between it and the racial reckoning we're seeing today. But we begin with a tricky covid variant and the lessons we could learn from the UK. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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U.K. extends lockdown over spread of delta variant

Guests: Dr. Deepti Gurdasani, Dr. Sumon Chakrabarti

SOUNDCLIP

As things stand and on the evidence that I can see right now, I'm confident that we will not need more than four weeks and we won't need to go beyond July the 19th. It's unmistakeably clear the vaccines are working and the sheer scale of the vaccine rollout has made opposition incomparably better than in previous waves.

MG: How quickly things change when it comes to covid-19. That was U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson yesterday breaking the news to the British public that they will have four more weeks of lockdown instead of a planned reopening. The U-turn on lifting restrictions is meant to confront the Delta variant of the virus that is spreading rapidly. That same variant is already here in Canada. So for more on what we might expect from it, I'm joined by a doctor, Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist and senior lecturer and machine learning at Queen Mary, University of London. Doctor, good morning.

DR. DEEPTI GURDASANI: Good morning.

MG: We heard Boris Johnson there extending lockdown for another four weeks because of the rise in the Delta variant. What is the mood in the U.K. right now?

DR. DEEPTI GURDASANI: Oh, I'm not sure I can speak to that. I think it's a sort of combination of things. But I think most people actually support a more cautious approach. And that's always been the case from the beginning of a pandemic, that people actually have been quite ahead of government in wanting a more cautious approach and an approach that focuses on public health and controlling the pandemic.

MG: What do you make of the UK government's call to, you know, put the brakes on a little bit when it comes to reopening?

DR. DEEPTI GURDASANI: I mean, I think it was inevitable given, you know, the government actually failed to prevent a new variant coming in, which was sort of done, you know, against all advice on having a comprehensive border controls. And once the waiting came and we made mistakes, we continue to open up in the face of a variant that had cases doubling every week. We removed mitigations and schools, which became a very prominent area of spread of this variant, which essentially led to this really and now becoming dominant. And our primary variant is the population, which, of course, has changed the shape of the pandemic trajectory, given it's more transmissible, it's more severe and also more able to escape vaccine.

MG: You said doubling every week. I mean, how quickly is this spreading?

DR. DEEPTI GURDASANI: So at the moment, it looks like cases are doubling every nine to 11 days or so. In some areas, the spread is faster. What's really concerning is that the spreads and increase in cases has also been accompanied by a rise in hospitalisations, particularly in those areas where the variant took hold earlier on and cases that are surging earlier on. So we are seeing this in parts of north west England and in parts of Scotland and even overall in England. We are now seeing a rise in hospitalisations week on week.

MG: And is your sense I mean, you hinted a little bit with the border control issue, is your sense that health officials were prepared for how quickly this variant would spread?

DR. DEEPTI GURDASANI: No, I don't think so, although I don't understand why they weren't prepared. Because, I mean, the data from India, for example, although sparse, was quite clear that, you know, it's a variant that became dominant in a matter of sort of four to six weeks. And our early days, even when it was growing in numbers from very low numbers, showed us that it was doubling in cases, while our other variant before this, the alpha variant, was actually dropping in number. So it sort of gives an idea of even, you know, in significant restrictions, this variant was spreading very rapidly, which tells us how much more fatal than the alpha variant.

MG: You mentioned schools as well. What do we know about the variance when it comes to children?

DR. DEEPTI GURDASANI: So what we've seen is that, you know, children were affected first and the cases rose and children first. And we saw, for example, one of the areas both in which was affected early on, the rates in school age children were triple those in unvaccinated young adults and then spread into the community. And we see a pattern where this variant, for example, became dominant in that younger age group of sort of five to nine years over the Alpha variant [unintelligible] and we saw actually earlier on when the alpha event was spreading in November and December in the UK. So for some reason, we are seeing that, you know, schools are contributing substantially to spread, which unfortunately has been worsened in the UK by lack of safety measures and mitigations and schools focussed on containing aerosol transmission.

MG: In this country, the third wave kind of got underway while people and particularly in health care settings, were still coping with the overwhelming effects of the second wave, and that kind of exacerbated a very difficult situation. What is the state of the UK health care system right now with this variant beginning to spread?

DR. DEEPTI GURDASANI: The U.K. health care system is very fragile at the moment. It's been through two devastating waves, at which point in time, you know, our health care capacity was reached essentially and possibly even overwhelmed. So we have millions of people now waiting for routine care, which couldn't be provided over the last year because of what's been happening. So at this point in time, you know, all of our government's aim seems to be not to overwhelm healthcare capacity by which, of course, they mean they shouldn't be ICU bed and oxygen shortages for, you know, covid patients. We actually need to be focussing on protecting the healthcare system even more because it needs to be able to deal with those backlogs, provide routine care. And, you know, the doctors and nurses and staff have been massively impacted over the last year with disaster management and are suffering the trauma, I think needs this [unintelligible]. So I think we can be focussed on not reaching hospital capacity. We need to protect our health care systems. But even beyond that, allowing transmission to continue is a huge risk of long covid. We know that 13 percent of people who get infected, including young, healthy adults, predominantly go on to have symptoms for 12 weeks or more, irrespective of whether they had mild infection or asymptomatic infection initially. And, you know, this may have long lasting impact. And we don't really understand. We also need to contain transmission, because one thing we are seeing in the UK, for example, is we are seeing mutations develop on top of the Delta variant. For example, you know, mutations that are common with the Beta, the so-called South Africa variant, and virus evolution adaptation will continue unless we keep on top of transmission. And there's always a risk that they will be more escape mutations and more movement towards escape unless we prevent this. And, you know, in countries that are using vaccination as a primary strategy out of this, having an escape really and develop that could escape vaccines even more, could massively scupper, you know, a lot of effort that's gone in for several months. And take us back to square one, which is something we desperately need to avoid.

MG: You said that the window to contain this is very, very narrow. And once this variant becomes dominant, only very, very strict restrictions will help contain it. What would work if this thing really were to take hold?

DR. DEEPTI GURDASANI: I mean, it's very hard to say because, for example, even elimination zones like Vietnam that imported the Delta and with some other mutations on top really struggle to contain it, despite having very, very good test rates and isolate systems, because essentially the rate at which such a variant that 60 percent more transmissibile spreads outpaces our ability to contain it. I mean, given that our current restrictions are not containing it, I don't have a clear example of what would contain it except from what we saw in India. In India, what seemed to contain it was hard locked down because it's very clear that when you have a more transmissible variant, the usual restrictions don't have the same impact. And for us, even before our phase three, the opening of restrictions when we had quite significant restrictions on the schools were opened this way and we're still doubling week on week. So I think once it's established in the community, it takes very, very severe restrictions to contain it. But one of the things that I think would have a huge impact would be putting in mitigation schools, because that is clearly one of the areas that really facilitates that spread. But, you know, the best thing is not to let it take hold and to try and contain it when it's localised or early on, because once it's widespread, what you're looking at is longer term restrictions to begin to control. And that is, unfortunately, even if you have high levels of vaccination like we have in the U.K., because, again, we're dealing with a variant that's far more transmissible and still able to escape vaccines to a degree.

MG: So just in the last minute or so that we have, I mean, we're starting to see this here in Canada. What's a word of advice that you would give us?

DR. DEEPTI GURDASANI: I would say don't let it get established. This is a variant that will change the shape of your pandemic trajectory. Prevent it. So, you know, if you have it in small numbers, try and contain it in a localised way. It's better to go aggressive and hard and early rather than let it spread, which will have long term impacts on your response. And even if you have high levels of vaccination, this level of vaccine escape can mean that it's harder to reach herd immunity thresholds. You will still have a significant number of your population, you know, that's unprotected or less protected like children. It can still lead to a lot of long covid. It can increase the potential for future mutation because of the level of transmission. So, you know, putting those measures in place and put in mitigation in schools. Go aggressive and hard early. Don't think you can live with this particular variant, because I think that's a folly.

MG: Good to speak with you. I appreciate your time this morning. Thank you very much.

DR. DEEPTI GURDASANI: Thanks for having me.

MG: Dr. Deepti Gurdasani is a clinical epidemiologist and senior lecturer in Machine Learning at Queen Mary University of London. Canadian provinces are watching developments in the UK closely, but many say the situation here is different. Dr. Sumon Chakrabarti is an infectious disease physician at Trillium Health Partners in Mississauga, Ontario. Doctor, good morning to you.

DR. SUMON CHAKRABARTI: Good morning.

MG: How concerned should we be here in Canada with the Delta variant?

DR. SUMON CHAKRABARTI: That's a complicated question, but I would say that, you know, the concern should be that this is something we certainly need to keep an eye on. That said, you know, we're in a very fundamentally different position than we were, say, three months ago with the alpha variant. We have, you know, 70 percent vaccine coverage and growing in terms of second doses as well. And I think that we have to remember these vaccines are really, really good at preventing severe disease and death. And I think that with this in mind, the concern that I have is much less than I had for the alpha variant back at the beginning of the year.

MG: There have been outbreaks already, though, of the Delta variant. There was this story of of a mine in Nunavut of it that had a worker who tested positive with the variant. Close to 100 people at the mine then tested positive with it. Does that give us a sense as to how transmissible this variant is?

DR. SUMON CHAKRABARTI: Absolutely. One thing that we can say is this is the exact same situation that we had with the alpha variant. We know that people who are vaccinated, even with one dose, are protected. And you're going to tend to see this in areas where people are congregating indoors for long periods of time. Mining is a perfect example, hospitals, congregate living settings, factories, these kind of places. But again, the outbreak itself is certainly shows that it's transmissible. But this is not something that we're unfamiliar with. We saw it with Alpha. We can deal with it again and again. I think that this is going to be a different situation.

MG: I guess the one thing with that story is that there were workers who were there in the mine who tested positive, but then they flew home to other provinces. And so you wonder whether to your point, that's a bit of history repeating itself.

DR. SUMON CHAKRABARTI: Absolutely. And that's it. I think that we have to keep in mind that once we go back to normal, that there's going to be movement across borders with the provincial or federal. And that said, this is part of the reason why blanket vaccination helps, because even if you do have cases of people that travel, at least is going to be contained and certainly people staying out of hospital.

MG: You mentioned hospitals. There was an outbreak at a Calgary hospital. Over 20 people contracted this variant. Take a listen to Dr. Lynora Saxinger, who's an infectious disease physician at the University of Alberta.

SOUNDCLIP

Some regions in Alberta have essentially no Delta. Other areas it's been more. And 20 or even 30 percent of recent isolates, and so the trend is not very reassuring overall. And of course, Calgary has had that outbreak at the Foothills Hospital. So I think a number of the cases might be associated with that outbreak as well. So it remains to be seen whether we're going to see widespread community transmission or whether this is all in like outbreaks that might be more controllable than widespread community transmission. The overall case counts have been very reassuring. Our hospitalisation and ICU rates have been actually declining very nicely. And so things look great. But history would tell us that a new transmissible variant starting to kind of come up from behind, even in the setting of overall the case numbers is a bit of a red flag.

MG: Dr. Chakrabarti, how much of a red flag should this be?

DR. SUMON CHAKRABARTI: You know, I very much agree with what Dr. Saxinger was saying. Again, I'll says that a lot of what we're doing is comparing what happened with the Alpha variant B117, back a couple of months ago. We have to remember that when that happened, there was a number of different conditions that don't exist at the current time. Number one, we didn't have vaccine coverage. Number two, it was winter. So more people inside, much easier for these things to spread. And number three, in many places, we were just coming off the back of a second wave. The hospitals hadn't decompressed yet. Put all that together and you got a bad situation on our hands back then. Now things are different, even if we do get a bit of a wave, a bit of a bump in cases and hospitalisations with the Delta variant, we're in a much better position. We're not going to have as many hospitalisations. Vaccine coverage there to protect us. Again, it's something we should keep an eye on. But I think looking at the situation, it's going to be much better. I think we're going to be able to handle this without having to shut down the community for longer than we need to.

MG: Many of those people who contracted the Delta variant in Calgary had received two doses of the vaccine. What should we make of that?

DR. SUMON CHAKRABARTI: This is a very good point. We have to remember that the vaccine is not there to completely make it so that your swab is negative. It's meant to take your disease, covid-19, and essentially take away the chance of you being so severe that you're hospitalised with it. So in the setting of outbreaks where you're actually going out looking for it, it's not unusual to find people that have a positive swab, but they're otherwise well. The same thing happened down south with a baseball team. It was, but many of them had- the Yankees - they had had the vaccine. Many of them were asymptomatic, but they had a positive test. So that's the big thing, that you've now taken the virus and you've defanged it. People are so mild they don't even realise they have it. And on a population level, that's a huge thing.

MG: And to your point, I mean, there was a study that came out of Public Health England showing that even one dose of the Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccine is really effective at preventing serious illness with the Delta variant.

DR. SUMON CHAKRABARTI: Absolutely. And I think that's been lost in the discussion. We keep hearing is 33 percent number that public essentially hears and says, oh, one dose of vaccine is useless. No, even if it were a 33 percent with one dose, on a population level, that's huge. It makes a huge difference. But if we look at closer, keeping people out of hospital, it's 70 percent effective. And I think 90 percent for the Pfizer, AstraZeneca 70. And that's huge. That that's going to make a big difference of either getting a small bump in hospitalisations or a massive bump that we saw at the beginning of the year in England. It was in December. I don't think we're going to see that again.

MG: How closely are you watching what's happening in the U.K.? I mean, they have had to halt their reopening plans and there are questions as to whether we should follow suit. The restrictions are lifting very quickly in many parts of this country. Should we be pumping the brakes as well?

DR. SUMON CHAKRABARTI: I don't think so. I certainly am watching what's happening there because this gives us an idea of of the movement of Delta, the characteristics of Delta. But this said, we have to remember that we are in a different situation right now. Again, with vaccine coverage, more and more variants are going to come. And this is a societal question. Every single time we have a variant coming, are we going to shut down the community or are we going to have faith in the vaccines, go to the areas we know are going to need help, prevent things and do good old fashioned infection prevention and control. And I think that's what we have to ask ourselves going forward. If we're not going to have a situation where hospitals are overwhelmed then why are we shutting down the community? I think we still need to be careful with a reopening, but I think we should do it in a one way fashion and really start to move on with our lives.

MG: A one way fashion. But be careful. What does that mean? That seems like two divergent points of view.

DR. SUMON CHAKRABARTI: Let's put it this way. So I think that, you know, I like the greater way that we're doing this. You know, you're doing it in stages. What I'm saying is that once you've opened a stage, if you see a bump in cases, you immediately go back into restriction. You know, we were going back and forth in the red the grey zones back then. But the other thing to remember is that I'm not asking us to pack the Air Canada Centre right now. I think that we can still do this once we open up to a certain way, I don't think we should ever go back to restrictions again. I think that we can handle this, especially now in the post vaccine era where we have great coverage with this miraculously effective vaccine.

MG: The other part is just getting the vaccines to the people who need them, given the fact that this variant spreads as rapidly as you've been saying. What do health authorities need to do in terms of ensuring that the vaccines get to the people who need them the most as soon as possible?

DR. SUMON CHAKRABARTI: I think, first of all, going to the targeted areas and this is already happening. You know, the areas that we know people are going to need the second dose and first dose, frankly. Congregate living settings, congregate get work settings. We saw a lot of that in Peel where I am. And also going to the postal codes and the regions that are having a lot of case burden right now, for example, the Porcupine County in Ontario. Doing that, targeting these areas and also other things such as the tried and tested infection prevention, control: ventilation, you know, distancing masks where you need it in indoors, where it's difficult to distance. But all these things are these non pharmaceutical interventions are going to be able to fall away once things start to go forward, cases drop, hospitalisations are dropping like a stone right now. And again, vaccine coverage is kind of our main tool against this.

MG: Just finally, I mean, there's a lot of vaccine enthusiasm, people getting, to your point, their second doses, many people first dose already the weather is warming up. There is the sense that this is almost done. But it seems as though if we're watching this and I'm going to take, you know, year notes of not caution, but also that we need to keep moving forward in heart. But also there does seem to be the sense that we're not out of the woods just yet.

DR. SUMON CHAKRABARTI: It kind of always seems like that doesn't it? W henever we're feeling good, there always seems to be something of a caveat. And I just have to, I think, see that it's important for us to now change our perspective on what's going to happen going forward. We're going to be open. Yes, there's going to be cases. Yes, there are going to be outbreaks in certain areas. But the point is we're going to be able to handle it like we've handled it before with other respiratory viruses, you know, at a hospital health care level, and absorb that. But I think that from for the public to know is just because we have an increase in case count, it doesn't mean that we have to shut down the community. We've been hearing that for the past year because of the situation that we were in. But right now, it's a fundamentally different situation, going forward, moving on with their lives. And I think that we have to keep society moving and deal with this on a health care level without having to shut down the community.

MG: That is an optimistic perspective I think a lot of people will embrace. Doctor, it's great to speak with you. Thank you very much.

DR. SUMON CHAKRABARTI: Thanks for having me. Take care.

MG: Dr. Suman Chakrabarti is an infectious disease physician at Trillium Health Partners in Ontario. CBC News is next. And then.

SOUNDCLIP

We can't keep building beds to take care of people. We have to stop people from getting to that stage. And that's what this drug will do. Maybe. But if we don't try it, how do we find out?

MG: It is a drug that is being called a light in the darkness by Alzheimer's patients. Canada is not yet willing to try it. One of my next guests would very much like to find out what its impact could be. That story in six minutes. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current CBC Radio One. Stay with us.

Canadian living with dementia urges approval of new Alzheimer's drug, but scientists skeptical

Guests: Simone Fishburn, Bob Murray, Dr. Howard Chertkow

MG: Good morning, I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current.

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MG: Still to come, the right to bear arms in America has a long, complicated and bloody history, especially when it's viewed through the lens of race. The historian Carol Anderson looks at the role of race in the evolution of the Second Amendment in her new book. And she's my guest in 30 minutes. But first, questions swirling around a brand new drug for dementia.

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MG: Patients suffering from dementia have precious few options when it comes to treatment. The drugs on the market are for managing symptoms, not treating the underlying disease of Alzheimer's. That is until now. Last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced it approved a drug called Aduhelm. It might slow the progress of the disease or it might not. Just two years ago, clinical trials were halted due to a lack of evidence that the drug actually worked. And three members of an FDA advisory panel have resigned in protest over its accelerated approval. Simone Fishburn is VP and editor in chief of BioCentury. That covers the biopharma industry. Simon, good morning.

SIMONE FISHBURN: Good morning.

MG: In the best case scenario, how is this drug supposed to work to tackle Alzheimer's?

SIMONE FISHBURN: Well, the drugs are supposed to work by finding a beta amyloid, which it does. Beta amyloid forms deposits in the brain. The drug is supposed to stop them from forming aggregates and these aggregates that are seen in Alzheimer's that thought to be involved in the pathology of the disease. There is little controversy that they appear in the disease, but there's a big controversy going back 20, 30 years over whether they cause the disease cause rather than correlation. But in particular, the controversy is over whether getting rid of these deposits, these amyloid aggregates or preventing them from aggregating is going to slow the cognitive decline and produce the clinical benefit.

MG: There were clinical trials that were done on this drug. And they were halted, as I mentioned. How did the drug get approved if the clinical trials were halted?

SIMONE FISHBURN: Yes. Well, that is a complicated story, which I'll try and go into. So the company that makes the drug Biogen stop the trials for futility because they weren't working. And then what happened is the company went back over the data and there were actually two trials, one of the low dose, one of the dose. And it said, well, wait a minute, if we look at the high dose trial and we see that at one time when half the patients are still on the drug, looked like they were actually improving and all beating placebo rather than improving, they said what would have happened if we'd kept everybody on the drug and not stopped halfway. And so sort of imagine you're drawing a line on a graph and then you sort of keep the dotted line, but you would have continued it. So they said, you know, they used a calculation and they said if we'd carried on dosing everybody, we would see a difference from placebo. And that is a calculation. It's not evidence that if you treat the patients, but they put it together and they went to FDA and that was an advisory panel which we can get into. And the FDA said, OK, we see that this drug clears amyloid, which the other data showed quite clearly. It did clear the amyloid. And then they said and we believe that amyloid is involved in the disease. And so we think it's and I'm using, quote unquote, reasonably likely that this will have a clinical benefit and reasonably likely is the standard that allows them to create a surrogate endpoint. So clearing amyloid is a surrogate endpoint. The real endpoint would be clinical benefit, which is slowing cognitive decline. And so FDA said, well, what we actually did is we looked at this data and we looked at data from about six different drugs. And we really believe across the different drugs that there's a connexion between clearing amyloid and slowing dementia. And so we are going to approve this drug with the surrogate endpoint and we're going to approve it with accelerated approval, based on that end point, which means that the company can market the drug and doctors can prescribe the drug. But Biogen has to do another trial in the broad patient population. And if that trial is negative, FDA can withdraw the approval.

MG: You mentioned the advisory panel, the advisory panel to the FDA recommended against approving this drug. 10 members out of 11 voted against this. The last one was uncertain. I mentioned that three members of the panel have since resigned because they don't believe there's enough evidence here. The perception is that the FDA in some ways bent over backwards to approve this drug. Is that a fair perception?

SIMONE FISHBURN: I think that's a very fair perception that FDA bent over backwards. The advisory committee was quite slamming, in fact, and they criticised the way the statistics were done. They criticised. FDA for, you know, looking only at one trial selectively and not the other one. One of them said at the time they said it was like shooting a shotgun at a barn and then painting a target around the bullet holes afterwards. So a lot of people feel that FDA went out of its way to approve this drug. I think it is important to note that FDA is also listening to patient voices and patients have been clamouring for a drug, quite understandably. And, you know, for one investor, one person said to me, it really seems as if the FDA is saying, you know, because there was another situation, a different drug, where FDA just something a little bit similar. They said we're going to say if it's safe enough to put it, put it out there and just make payers decide if it actually works, which is not the way you're supposed to do it. So people are concerned because there's a lot of money going to be spent on this drug and they feel it might be giving patients false hope. On the other hand, you know, maybe it's time to put something out there. So but there's absolutely a perception, there's a fair perception that the FDA looked very favourably for a way to improve this drug.

MG: Let me we just have a minute or so left. I want to squeeze two quick questions. And one is and you've hinted at this, could this create kind of a precedent to encourage more companies to go ahead with drug development if it's less onerous to get an approval? But we may also end up with with with drugs that may or may not work particularly well being approved. Is that possible?

SIMONE FISHBURN: Absolutely. Absolutely. So inside the Alzheimer's field, other drugs that try to beta amyloid have absolutely every reason to believe that they can go forward and have a surrogate point so they will go forward. Other drugs outside of that in neurodegeneration, other companies working. Well, I absolutely think because the FDA has said that they said we want to see more more accelerated approvals in neurodegeneration. That doesn't mean they're going to lower the standard is that is what they're saying. But absolutely, you can believe that drug makers will believe that they have a shorter path now.

MG: Just very briefly, is there the possibility that this drug could be withdrawn now that it's been approved? If if further evidence proves that it's not actually doing what people say it's doing?

SIMONE FISHBURN: Well, technically, there's a possibility. But Biogen has nine years, eight or nine years to do its trials and present the evidence. Hopefully by then there are more things out there. There are other drugs behind it by Eli Lilly. And the accelerated approval absolutely allows the FDA to withdraw it. But if they've got eight or nine years to do that, I'm not sure how big the impact that will be. The money will be spent by then.

MG: This is a complicated story and you've done a great job at weaving your way and our way through it. Simone thank you very much.

SIMONE FISHBURN: Thank you for having me.

MG: Simone Fishburn is VP and editor in chief of BioCentury. It covers the biopharma industry. Now, amongst those following news closely about Biogen's new drug are those most affected by dementia, people like Bob Murray. Bob is an 82 year old resident of Seaforth, Ontario. He has mild dementia and writes a newspaper column about his experiences. Bob Murray, good morning to you.

BOB MURRAY: Good morning.

MG: What was your reaction when you heard the news that this drug had been approved for patients with early signs of dementia?

BOB MURRAY: I was excited because the diagnosis that they're looking for is mild cognitive impairment with Alzheimer's disease. And that's exactly what I was diagnosed with by the trial on that programme.

MG: Tell me about your diagnosis. You were diagnosed in 2013,

BOB MURRAY: Was scary because the first thing when you investigate dementia, which is often interpreted as Alzheimer's, as it has six to nine years left out of useful life, which may maybe your total life. So I was looking at a disease which is terminal, which has no cure. It was very scary. And I was newly married at that time, and my new wife, who is sitting beside me right now, didn't know what to do. She didn't expect me to have this kind of a diagnosis at this stage of our life.

MG: In the absence of new treatments, what is day to day life look like?

BOB MURRAY: Well, I've done very well. I was just north of Toronto and I had all sorts of help from a [unintelligible] memory programme, but I moved to Seaforth, which is in the rurals, and my personal care doctor said to me, I don't have experience in Alzheimer's and dementia and any of this stuff. So after a few years of living at Seaforth, she finally said to me, if you can get any referrals for me of people who can help you, I will refer you. And this is the key to beating a sys-- so I shouldn't say being system, but you had to get into the system and you need your personal care doctor to get you, on your side helping you out. And I did that. So in about 2015, I started researching. So the research that I did was that I should be volunteering in safe work to the gal for the Alzheimer's Society where you write about your life experiences. So I've now written 97 columns and I've never had one rejected by either the Alzheimer's Society or a local newspaper that I'm in. And I've become a non expert expert expert my experience and what dementia is. And I know you're going to ask me, what does it mean? Well, my two favourite words, I forget, I don't remember. My wife is going to be playing golf today and I was really apprehensive all night. I didn't sleep well. I was going to face you by myself without her by my side. So she postponed the golf till 2:00 o'clock, and she is here beside me. So you lose the confidence in yourself. I always had great confidence in myself. I have been an independent person, so I've been looking for a drug. Drugs through everything but the Health Canada studies them to see whether they will hurt anybody. They don't really judge whether they're really going to help and what this drug is going to do. I hope if Health Canada ever accepts it, it's going to give us an opportunity to remove some of the plaques that are in our brain. So I've looked at all the arguments given by people against this and come up with my personal arguments because what else have I got?

MG: Well, how to that point? I mean, how important is hope in the life of somebody with dementia? How important is having some bit of hope there?

BOB MURRAY: Well, you know, I've got a father and a daughter who are type one diabetics, and insulin is keeping them alive. My father died after 52 years with type one. Look at the covid. It's a preventative vaccine. It's not a cure. It's to stop people from getting it. So we need to find a way to get it to people and get people to get diagnosed if they think they have a dimentia of some sort. It's very important that this happens.

MG: What's your message to I mean, the decision makers, politicians, the people who make decisions about why it's so important to find those better answers and better treatments for patients with Alzheimer's?

BOB MURRAY: We don't have to wait for the perfect, perfect answer. We need to make interim answers. We don't know that they covid-19 vaccine is going to work in three or four years, but we have to take a risk and the risk is minor. And government is adding two hundred new beds to get people who are who have Alzheimer's. They need 24/7 care. We can't keep building beds to take care of people. They have to stop people from getting to that stage. And that's what this drug will do. Maybe. But if we don't try it, how do we find out?

MG: You started by saying that when you got the diagnosis, it was really scary. Does it feel less scary now knowing that a drug like this is on the horizon?

BOB MURRAY: That's a really good question, because when you're threatened with a terminal disease, you can't get scarier than that. But I found out in 2013, but I didn't get the precise diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment with Alzheimer's disease in 2020. And I said to myself, at least right now, I know what I've got. It's not just a broad envelope of a whole bunch of diseases. And then when there's this ad and I read the press release by the Alzheimer's Association in the States, there is light at the end of the tunnel and this is the light. And then I read about all the controversy and I go, come on, guys, do something, do it now. You know, people say, I don't have dementia. I'm old. Wow. My father lived to 89 and his brothers and sisters lived between 89 and a hundred. And I've got the right genes. And I've got every right to be all successfull and to live well, so my 97 columns, so there's a manual from my perspective, but nobody's ever picked it up. Hopefully, it may be a start to that.

MG: We'll send people to it through through the radio. I'm really glad to have the chance to talk to you. It's really important to hear what this drug might mean for yourself and for others who find themselves living with Alzheimer's. Bob Murray, great to talk to you. Thank you very much.

BOB MURRAY: Glad I talked to you. And I will be following your programmes very closely. You're doing a good job.

MG: Thank you very much. Take good care of yourself.

BOB MURRAY: Thank you very much.

MG: Bob Murray is a resident of Seaforth, Ontario, and he writes a column and a blog called My Voyage with Dementia. Dr. Howard Chertkow is a senior scientist and neurologist at Baycrest Hospital, director of the Kimmel Family Centre for Brain Health. Doctor, good morning to you.

DR. HOWARD CHERTKOW: Good morning.

MG: How important is it for patients like Bob Murray? He's talking about wanting to live, to be old, to have some sort of hope when they're living with this disease.

DR. HOWARD CHERTKOW: Hope is very important, but my concern is great listening to to Bob and what he had to say. My concern is that the way patients are seeing the new drug as well as you can imagine, is comparing it to, as Bob mentioned, to insulin, the covid vaccine, you know, these were home runs in medical therapy. Insulin revolutionised the treatment of diabetes and made diabetics able to live full lives. So they're expecting the expectations have now been raised. And this isn't a home run. This is barely getting on to first base or maybe being tagged out and the umpire calls you safe where we're going to have the possibility of having a drug available, which will raise expectations. And then the patients will be very disappointed when they find out, despite this medication, they still go on and get worse and get severe dementia. So this is what worries me.

MG: I guess one of the questions coming out of that we'll get further into this. But is, is something better than nothing. The people have been waiting for a drug like this for a long time. And Bob was hinting at that. And that seems in some ways to be behind the enthusiasm that is that is following this story.

DR. HOWARD CHERTKOW: I think you're absolutely right that the FDA is desperate to approve something, the Alzheimer's Society in Canada, Alzheimer Society of Canada, the Alzheimer's Association in the United States, they've been waiting so long. People get desperate. But the fact is that we're talking about a drug that, as someone pointed out very well, may or may not work. And we're going through a period where the credibility of science and credibility of physicians is on the line. We can't even get everyone to take the cold vaccine, which we know works from scientific evidence. What's going to happen when we come out with this very expensive drug, which will be 30 to 50000 dollars a year for each patient, and people have to take it years to see if there's any effect and then it becomes clear, you know, it didn't really work. And even when it works, it slows progression by 22 percent. The people are going to be very disillusioned and we're going to lose credibility.

MG: What are the main options for patients who are dealing with this disease now?

DR. HOWARD CHERTKOW: Sadly, we have symptomatic therapies which have some effect in some patients called the colon histories inhibitors and another drug called Memantine, which is related. But these are not disease modifying drugs. What we have we know about most effectively is prevention. We know that there are things people can do, including lifestyle interventions and better control of diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, which could probably decrease dementia by up to 40 percent. And this is why, because of the [unintelligible] Centre, we're focussing on prevention approaches. But the good, great medications to stop Alzheimer's disease haven't appeared because, frankly, we don't actually understand the cause of Alzheimer's disease. Is it one disease or a number that just superficially look like? We need the basic science that revealed how diabetes worked. To see that coming up with insulin? We're still because of the complexity of the brain, we're not at the point of understanding Alzheimer's disease the way we need to understand it. So, in fact, the best use of funding right now is to put it into research, to get us to the answer as quickly as possible. And you should know that if we send end up in Canada spending three to four billion dollars a year on this treatment, which is what the price tag will be, that's about 100 times as much as all the money that goes into research from dementia. So the government will be diverting funds from research, which is what we need to a treatment which in fact may or may not work.

MG: How much emphasis should be put on this hypothesis that it's this protein, the amyloid that that is causing Alzheimer's and dementia? That's in many ways what was is at the heart of this controversy around this drug.

DR. HOWARD CHERTKOW: The amyloid hypothesis, which has been around for 30 years, has been about 80 to 90 percent of the research is called sometimes called the hypothesis that refuses to die, because there's been considerable evidence now that people can live up to their 80s or 90s with amyloid protein in their brain without getting memory loss or dementia. And there's pretty good evidence now that taking the amyloid out of the brain doesn't cure your Alzheimer's disease, doesn't make you get better. So so it's complicated. Probably amyloid plays a role in some of the patients with dementia, not all of them. In the end, those patients that may be part of the story. There are probably some patients where it's the whole story. But sadly, although the focus has been on the very effect of this medication on amyloid, and it does get rid of the all the gomers that precede amyloid, it gets rid of the amyloid we see there. But in the studies that were done to prove that this works, it was ascertained beforehand that patients admitted to the studies had changes in amyloid in their brain, but they had abnormal amyloid. The drug has been released and or has been approved by the FDA for all Alzheimer's patients, whether they have amyloid in the brain or not. So it's almost inevitable that people who don't even have amyloid deposition in the brain will be prescribed this medication, which really doesn't have much chance of helping them.

MG: I guess just in the last minute or so that we have. Is it also inevitable, given the clamour for some hope, but also the fact that the FDA, despite great controversy, has approved this, that Health Canada will follow suit and that this drug will be made available here?

DR. HOWARD CHERTKOW: Well, we're an independent country and we're a single payer country. And I'm sure Health Canada is going to look critically at the data available. You know, right now, the problem is that, as you can imagine, Aduhelm would require specialist involvement is given by intravenous. Injections once a month, you have to have amyloid pet scanning after the MRI scans available to follow patients because 30 to 40 percent of the people at the high dose that was effective develop some swelling in the brain or some bleeding. So you have to monitor for these side effects. So basically, our system isn't really prepared to use a medication like this. An expensive medication will have to make some very important changes. And I would like to see this being done for medication that we're confident as physicians that we consider our patients. This is going to work, this is going to stop Alzheimer's disease or this is going to improve things.

MG: Doctor, great to speak with you. Thank you very much.

DR. HOWARD CHERTKOW: Thank you very much.

MG: Dr. Howard Chertkow is senior scientist, neurologist at Baycrest Hospital, scientific director as well of the Canadian Consortium of Neurodegeneration in Ageing. It's a national organisation for dementia research. If you are living with dementia or have a family member who is, we'd love to hear from you and where you're finding hope and what you make of this story, which is offering hope to some. You can email us The Current at CBC Dot. See a coming up after your regional update. Carrying a gun supposed to be the right of every American citizen. Not nearly that simple, though, when you're black. The historian Carol Anderson is here next to talk about her new book, The Second Race and Guns and a Fatally Unequal America. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current. Back in 90 seconds.

Carol Anderson on the Second Amendment and a racial reckoning

Guest: Carol Anderson

MG: Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, you're listening to The Current. This next conversation deals with the disturbing subject of gun violence in 2016. Philando Castile was pulled over just outside of Minneapolis for a broken taillight. The police officer asked for his driver's licence. Mr. Castile did what the National Rifle Association advises Americans to do. He told the officer he had a firearm. The officer tells him not to pull it out. Seconds later, the officer shoots him repeatedly and fatally. Philando Castile's story is part of the bloody history of the black experience with guns in the United States, and that history is documented in Carol Anderson's new book. It's called The Second Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler, professor and chair of African-American studies at Emory University. And she this morning is in Atlanta, Georgia. Carol, good morning.

CAROL ANDERSON: Good morning, Matt.

MG: How do you explain the action of the police officer shooting almost immediately after hearing that Mr. Castile had a firearm?

CAROL ANDERSON: I explain it in terms of the antiblack in this, that courses through American society and American history antiblack, this is that fear of black people seeing black people as a threat, seeing black people as dangerous. And so the response is to curtail, to subjugate, to kill.

MG: Mr. Catile had a legal firearm. He disclosed it. And the NRA made its reputation in many ways, defending legal gun owners against the U.S. government and its efforts to curtail gun ownership. They often cite the Second Amendment. What was the reaction of the NRA to the killing of Philando Castile?

CAROL ANDERSON: Initially, they went virtually silent. It took pressure from black NRA members to pressure the the leadership to make a statement, and that statement was rather milquetoast. We believe that everyone, regardless of race, should have access to, you know, have we have the right to bear arms. That wasn't enough because this is the same NRA that after the Ruby Ridge and after Waco, which were violent white responses to federal officers, they call federal law officials jackbooted government thugs. But for philanderers, Castiel, it was we believe everybody has the right to bear arms. We have to wait until there's an investigation. I mean, so it was really not the NRA that protects whites right. To bear

MG: arms. Why that discrepancy and why not a vigorous defence of Mr. Castile's right to bear arms?

CAROL ANDERSON: Again, it is that anti blackness that is in American society. It is the the the the sense that black people are a threat, that black people are dangerous. And this emerges out of our history of slavery here in the U.S. and and so and we see it in this kind of disparate way, not just with Philando Castile, but it's where you see a 12 year old boy, Tamir Rice, a black child who's playing alone in a park in an open carry state, and he has a toy gun. And granted, the toy gun doesn't have the orange little tip on that says, hey, I'm a toy. But he is gunned down within two seconds after police arrive. And the police were like, he was dangerous, he was a threat. He was a threat. But they didn't gun down Dylann Roof, who was the white young man who killed nine black people in doing Bible study and they didn't gunned down Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a white teenager who gunned down three people, killing two. So the sense of threat is attached to blackness.

MG: Why did you want to write this book now?

CAROL ANDERSON: I was intrigued by my research has always been focussed in on the fractured citizenship of African-Americans.

MG: And looking at voting rights and issues beyond that, we've spoken with you about on this programme.

CAROL ANDERSON: Exactly. Exactly. And so after the killing of Philando Castile, it was this moment where journalists were asking after the NRA's virtual silence, well, don't black people have Second Amendment rights? And I went, wow, that's a great question. That is one of the rights that I have not explored in my work to date. And so I went hunting and I ended up back in the 17th century. And to bring that history all the way up to the 21st.

MG: What was the original thought behind the Second Amendment? I mean, that's the title of the book is called The Second. What was the original thought behind that Second Amendment?

CAROL ANDERSON: As I explored it, so we've got two different pillars here. One pillar is our current reigning narrative that it is about the individual right to bear arms and that to have a militia to stop domestic tyranny or foreign invasion, that's not what was going on really at the time. At the time, what the militia was designed for was to put down slave revolts. And that is what was coursing through in the debates that was very heavy in the debates, that the slave owners believed that they would be left defenceless if the federal government controlled the militia, if they did not have state control of the militia, because they're like, you know, you can't trust those folks in Pennsylvania and in Massachusetts. If we have a slave uprising, we will be left defenceless.

MG: That gets to that phrase of a well regulated militia, which which is often cited when people talk about the Second Amendment. Tell me more about that and what you believe the point of the well regulated militia was.

CAROL ANDERSON: Yeah, that well regulated militia was designed as part of the slave control mechanism. It was designed to to put down massive slave revolts and to provide a level of security for white colonists and then white Americans who were absolutely afraid that black people would seek retribution for all of the the the the barbarities of slavery that had been rained down upon them.

MG: In some ways, I mean, you compare the Second Amendment to the three fifths clause.

CAROL ANDERSON: Absolutely.

MG: What is that just for people who don't know, explain what that is.

CAROL ANDERSON: Yes. So the three fifths clause is part of the bribe that the the the North made with the south to sign on to the U.S. Constitution. The South was afraid that it would be outvoted in Congress, where you had the number of representatives based on your population and they didn't have as large a population as, say, New York or Pennsylvania or Massachusetts. And so what they wanted was to now count their enslaved people as people and not as property as they had originally demanded when it came to taxation, that the bargain that was cut was to count the enslaved as three fifths of a human being for the purpose of representation in Congress that added an additional eighteen representatives to the South in the U.S. Congress.

MG: How afraid were white people in I mean, we're looking at seventeen hundreds of of a revolution, of a black revolution. How concerned were people about that?

CAROL ANDERSON: Absolutely. They were terrified. They were terrified. And this is why you see an array of laws being passed dealing with denying access to weapons to the black population, including free blacks. You also see the architecture of slave control coming up with slave patrols, which were the smaller units designed to to monitor and to go into the slave cabins to to look for contraband like books, like weapons, like writing instruments. And and then you have the militia who which was designed to really be there to put down a massive slave revolt like it happened in 1739 in stone of South Carolina with the Stonewall Rebellion.

MG: What was happening there?

CAROL ANDERSON: Oh, that is when there was a massive slave revolt and up to 60 people were killed and it was the enslaved were trying to get to freedom in Spanish Florida because Florida did not have slavery. And so they were trying to get to Florida and and the alarm bells rang in the midst of. This revolt, because the law said that every white man had to have a gun and it was on a Sunday morning, and on that Sunday, the men had their guns in church and they took their guns and began to hunt down the the the enslaved who were trying to get to Florida. As I said, about 60 people were killed, 20 whites and 40 African-Americans. And the the response was just horrific. Violence rained down, beheadings, disembowelling the way to to send terror through the black population. This is what will happen to you if you demand freedom. They also passed laws saying that if you caught somebody, an enslaved person trying to get to Florida, you could skalp them. Then they passed the 1740 Negro Act, which defined African descended people as absolute slaves for those who are here and those not yet born. And then it said the things that they could not do, they could not have literacy, they could not move around freely, and they could not have access to guns post slavery.

MG: You write that the push to disarm black people has also been relentless and that that the concern around access to guns for African-Americans who were free was also a huge problem. Tell me a bit about what happened post slavery and how guns were kept out of the hands of black Americans.

CAROL ANDERSON: Post slavery, you had the thing called the black codes. The black codes were instituted by what I call these neo Confederate governments. And these were the members of the Confederacy, the groups that had attacked the United States in this and launched the Civil War. And President Andrew Johnson gave them amnesty. With that they then got control over their governments again and passed these black codes and these black codes just said, one, it was about the control of black labour, but it also said that it was about disarmament. Black people could not have got guns and black people had the guns from the war. And so you had the rise of these paramilitary groups, the and these militia groups and these domestic terrorist groups that went out working in league with these governments to disarm black people. It was a slaughter. Historian Annette Gordon Reed calls it a slow motion genocide, what was happening in the south to black people. And you had the the black troops from the union as an occupying force trying to get in between these paramilitary groups and and the freed people.

MG: What would it have meant for more African-Americans to be able to get guns? I mean, part of it is self-defence, I suppose. But but beyond that, what would it have meant if they were able to have access to the same rights when it came to the Second Amendment as white Americans?

CAROL ANDERSON: It would have meant - and I think the best way to understand this is to go back to the 1857 Dred Scott decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. In that decision, it was about whether an enslaved person could become free by living on free soil, by living in a non slave state. And Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote in that decision that black people have never been citizens. They weren't citizens at the founding. They weren't citizens because they couldn't get passports. They weren't citizens because they couldn't carry the mail and he said if they were citizens, they would be able to move from state to state freely and they would be able to carry guns wherever they wished. The black man has no rights that a white man is bound to respect.

MG: And that's how the Supreme Court was able to justify keeping guns out of the hands of black Americans, despite the fact that the Second Amendment is in the Constitution.

CAROL ANDERSON: Exactly, exactly. And you had another ruling in Georgia that a gun control law for white men was not was unconstitutional because it violated white men's Second Amendment rights. But a similar law that banned free blacks from having access to guns was constitutional. And so the sense of gun ownership as embodied in in citizenship was there. And it was that systematic denial of that that was coursing through the jurisprudence at the time.

MG: I want to take you to 1967. Huey Newton was the co-founder of the Black Panther Party for self-defence. Here he is speaking after a number of heavily armed Black Panthers entered the California State Assembly.

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The people in this car and the people in the legislature have not been acting like human beings. They put trumped up charges of conspiracy and felonies on everyone who went in to exercise a constitutional right and said they had no right to bear arms and a public place. The California penal code, section 12 on 22, 12 and 27 and also on the Second Amendment of the Constitution guarantees the citizen the right to bear arms on public property.

MG: Carol Anderson, I understand what's going on there. Did The Black Panthers have a point about the legality of carrying weapons into the California assembly?

CAROL ANDERSON: They had a point. They really had a point. And that is what they were carrying those arms in there for. They, the Black Panther Party for self-defence, had come into being as a response to the massive police brutality raining down on black folks in Oakland, California, and their strategy, as you can tell, they knew the law, their strategy was to open carry weapons and and and to keep their the legal distance away from police, but to monitor police as they were arresting black folk, they were policing the police was the strategy. The police did not like that. And they ran to Don Mulford, an assemblyman in the California legislature, and said, you've got to help us. And so Mulford was draughting legislation with the help of the NRA that to ban open carry. And the Panthers response was we have a right to open carry. And because there was no accountability in the system for the violence raining down on the black community from the police. And so you see in this moment, the legislature is more concerned with the Panthers than they are with the police violence.

MG: I think I mean, we're talking to you from Canada. And I think there are a lot of Canadians who find it difficult to understand how, to many Americans, how integral gun rights are to the American identity. What don't we understand? I mean, you've hinted at this when tracing all the way back to slavery and before. But what do we understand about that identity and that part of American identity?

CAROL ANDERSON: That that identity is really rooted in a sense of white fear, white fear of black people, white fear of the indigenous community, white fear of being under siege, and that their guns were their way of providing safety and security from that fear from those populations. And that sense of 'guns are my security' against that threat, that racialized threat is what has short circuited, really short circuited our ability to have true gun safety laws in this nation.

MG: When you say when you say that this is not a pro-gun book or an anti-gun book, I mean. Right. What is it then?

CAROL ANDERSON: This is a book about African-Americans rights as citizens rights, as human beings, black people's humanity. It is the anti blackness. With black skin as the threat, as the default threat in American society, it makes black life very precarious. So whether we're armed or whether we're unarmed, we are the threat. And this is why you see the the killings of black folks who are unarmed, the killings of black folks like Philando Castile who had a legal weapon, it just keeps happening. And what we keep hearing is I was afraid. I was threatened. They were dangerous.

MG: Just living in an open carry state where you can carry a gun on your hip or a rifle on your back, does that give any added protection in 2021 to black Americans who have illegally owned gun, do you think?

CAROL ANDERSON: No, it doesn't. It in fact, it heightens the fear. You know, one of the things that happened, for instance, in Tulsa, the in this recent commemoration, the 100 year commemoration of the Tulsa race massacre, was that there was a black militia that wanted to march. And there was all kinds of fear about these black people having guns, openly carrying them in an open carry state. You don't have that kind of fear when you have white men with guns.

MG: How do you think the the reckoning that has unfolded in the United States around race, sparked in large part by the murder of George Floyd by police, how is that going to impact the use of deadly force against black Americans by police, whether they're carrying illegal legally owned guns or not?

CAROL ANDERSON: I'm not seeing any kind of hesitancy on the police to back off from that sense of black as a threat. We're still getting black folks killed. We're still getting black folks tasered who have their hands up, as we saw with a child, a 17 year old in Ocean City, Maryland, this past weekend who had his hands up and the police were surrounding him for for vaping. There's no real sense of accountability and there's no real sense of black humanity. That is what we are wrestling with. And we're seeing the backlash as well to the uprisings, to the protests about these racialized killings. We're seeing it in terms of legislatures after legislatures passing laws banning critical race theory, banning the 16 19 project in the curriculum, banning the discussion about race and racism in the United States, in our histories, in our social studies courses, a way to say this never happened. This racism is not a part of American history.

MG: Before I let you go two final things. One is I mean, in the wake of the pandemic, but perhaps also in the wake of that backlash, you're seeing an increase in people buying guns for the first time. And black Americans, in many ways, the ownership of guns by black farmers for the first time is up by something like 58 percent this year. What does that tell you?

CAROL ANDERSON: It's telling me what I what I've seen historically in the past, that sense that there is no protection for black people in this society and they have to defend themselves.

MG: So what is the way out of this, then? Is it more guns or is it fewer guns? You see where am I coming from?

CAROL ANDERSON: I do. I do. And the way out of this, because guns really are the conundrum here. More guns don't make black people safe. Fewer guns don't make black people safe. What we have to really do is the hard work in the society to dismantle anti blackness. That's the hard answer. But that is the way we must go.

MG: And I know I mean, historians are loathe to predict the future, but knowing what you know and having done, you know, the hard work and putting a book like this together, do you think the country is ready, your country and other countries are ready to do that hard work of addressing antiblack racism?

CAROL ANDERSON: No, no. We look like we were almost ready, but it's like Star Wars, the Empire Strikes Back. And the like, as I said, the massive voter suppression laws that are coursing through the states now, the blockage in the Senate on a means to deal with laws targeted at black people to keep them from voting, the laws coming through our state legislatures to basically whitewash American history and to criminalise the teaching of race and racism in American history. There is such an entrenched resistance to acknowledging how we got here that it's going to take a lot more work.

MG: There is a real sweep to this book, and it's fascinating to talk to you about it. Carol, thank you as always.

CAROL ANDERSON: Thank you so much, Matt.

MG: Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler, professor and chair of African-American Studies at Emory University. Her new book is The Second Race and Guns and a Fatally Unequal America. Well, that is The Current for this Tuesday. Coming up next on CBC Radio One, it's Q. Stephan James and Shamier Anderson are Canadians. They're brothers. They're actors. Together, they have launched an organisation. It's called the Black Academy. This was put together to support an emerging black talent across Canada and the arts, entertainment and sports. They have gone off to Hollywood, but they are ensuring that their success is being felt back here in Canada. You'll hear them coming up in just a few moments on CBC Radio One. In the meantime, it turns out British Columbia is back. That province hit step two in its reopening plan today, meaning the people can now gather together outside in groups of up to 50. They can travel again for fun, alcohol service allowed at restaurants, bars and pubs until midnight. Are you feeling good, British Columbians? Will leave you with one of the best exports from Burnaby, British Columbia. Mr. Michael Bublé, I Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. We'll talk to you tomorrow.

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[Song: Feeling Good by Michael Buble]

Tuesday June 15, 2021 Transcript

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