Abacus Media Rights acquires Channel 4 doc probing race and vaccine hesitancy

Abacus Media Rights (AMR) has taken the worldwide distribution rights, excluding the UK, to a one-hour Channel 4 feature documentary about race, medical experiments and vaccine hesitancy.

Seyi Rhodes fronts Race & Medical Experiments: What’s the Truth?

Race & Medical Experiments: What’s the Truth? explores the links between Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy in some ethnic minorities and medical science’s toxic history of racially charged experiments that contributed to a mistrust of medical science.

An Uplands TV Production for C4, the show aired earlier this week on the UK public broadcaster.

Presented by presenter and investigative journalist Seyi Rhodes (How to Dump Your Mates), the documentary was directed by Edmund Moriarty and executive produced by David Olusoga and Mike Smith.

The documentary sees Rhodes travel to Tuskegee, Alabama, to discover the legacy of a notorious syphilis study where African American men were denied treatment and simply observed as their disease progressed.

He also uncovers another case where a 19th century gynaecologist practiced his surgical technique on enslaved women, without anaesthetic; how the British ran experiments to see how mustard gas affected Indian skin; and even how the US hunt to find Bin Laden used a fake vaccine programme to obtain DNA samples from his hideout.

Rhodes also meets Professor Stephen Thomas, an African American public health pioneer who, backed by the White House and President Biden, has turned 1,000 barbershops into places where vaccine hesitant people talk and listen, and if they want to, even get the vaccine after their hair cut.

Jonathan Ford, MD of AMR, described the film as “an extremely topical and eye-opening documentary.”