Quebec pioneer in HIV/AIDS research to be inducted into Canadian Medical Hall of Fame

This Saturday, the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame is inducting 6 new laureates for their leadership and contributions to medicine. One of them is Doctor Katherine Hankins. Now her list of achievements is long, so this is an abbreviated one. Doctor Hankins is a star researcher, a trailblazer in the study of HIV AIDS and a familiar and very trusted voice during the pandemic as Co Chair of Canada’s COVID-19 Immunity Task Force. Doctor Hankins joins us now from Washington. Thank you so much for joining us and congratulations to you. Thank you, Deborah. It’s an exciting time, I can only imagine. And and you’re joining a very select and prestigious group of scientists. So tell us, what does this mean to you? I am very humbled by this and I’m being honored with Sir Thomas Roddick, you know, who was really the pioneer for anti sepsis techniques in surgery? He died in 1923, so 100 years ago. And I’ve got four other inductees with me that are all stellar individuals. So this is really, it’s wonderful. It’s absolutely wonderful. Well, today we want to talk about you. You are originally from Alberta, and you moved to Quebec in 1986 to work with Montreal Public Health, and you started making waves pretty much right away. Just eight months into the job, HIV AIDS was exploding. You were given the job to come up with a campaign on safe sex practices, including condom use. Now it’s it’s quite a story and I I if you don’t mind, I’d let you sort of pick up the story and tell us where it went. Look at the bloom of youth. That’s incredible that you have this footage. Well, basically, basically I was asked to do a campaign on condoms for the province. It was actually from Montreal, but we didn’t have Montreal public Health. We had individual health departments in hospital, the hospital, so we didn’t have boards that would go to bat for you when you got into political trouble. And public health is essentially political. So what happened was at the very last moment, the Minister of Health canned and cancelled the campaign. And I had to make a decision like, was this important enough to lose my job over? And I decided it was. And so I convened a secret press conference. Everybody came because the original press conference had been, or the media conference had been cancelled and we got a tremendous amount of coverage. It was estimated one point, maybe $2,000,000 worth of advertising for the TV and the radio spots and it took three days and the leader of the opposition, Pierre Mark Johnson, stood up in the assembly and challenged the minister as to what she would do. So it was an exciting time. I did not lose my job from there. You you, you continued your work in HIV AIDS and you studied why women at tongue detention center in Montreal were developing HIV and you made the connection to intravenous drug use. And and what I want to talk about here is that that springboarded into the community in that you you put the science into action and and help create Cactus Montreal and its syringe program. How important do you feel it is that scientists connect with community through their research? Absolutely critical. If you don’t have people with lived experience around the table, when you’re designing research or designing programs, you’re not going to have successful programs. And so it’s really, really important to work together as partners. It improves the science and it makes the findings much more relevant. You you were talking just a minute ago about public health and how inherently political it it was when you started. What was your experience during the pandemic and and do you have the impression that that political hand in, in public health has has let go a little? Well, it’s interesting because in the end the buck stops with the politician who’s responsible, right? And we have science advisors across the country who were advising the political level. Some of them were able to have the ear of the politicians and to explain well what the best advice was and what needed to be done. Others of them faced real barriers and it was very difficult. So I think there’ll be a story to be written about what worked and what didn’t. I do know that if you look internationally, Canada did very well. We had lower cases, lower death rates than in the UK and in the US And I think it was in part because most of the politicians did work in partnership with the scientists to come up with the best policies. I I am sad to say that we’ve run out of time and there’s so much more to talk about, But I know that you’re in the process of retiring and what a wonderful recognition of your work this honor is. Again, congratulations to you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much.