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Published On June 16, 2020
POLICY
Podcast: A Tale of Two Pandemics
The crises of racism and COVID-19 overlap and reinforce one another. What steps can medicine take to make the pandemic response more just?
Throughout U.S. history, viral epidemics have disproportionately hurt minority groups. Native Americans died from the 1918 flu pandemic at four times the rate of other groups, and during the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, Latinos in California were twice as likely as whites to become ill and die. The prevalence of HIV among African-Americans today is seven times higher than it is among whites, and this trend, sadly, continues with COVID-19.
To take one example, African-Americans make up 29 percent of the population in Chicago, but account for 70 percent of COVID-19 related deaths. The reasons for this are complicated but are rooted in a racism that limits access to economic opportunities, housing and a healthy life.
“In health care, we are not immune to this,” says Joseph Betancourt, a physician and the chief equity and inclusion officer at Massachusetts General Hospital. He and teams at the hospital have been working to look after the needs of underserved communities during the pandemic. The protests after the killing of George Floyd on March 25 put their work in even sharper focus. “This idea of, ‘I can't breathe,’ I mean, the health care community fought tooth and nail to help COVID-19 patients breathe, and to watch somebody deliberately do that to a person has activated the nation and the world to a call for justice and change.”
The podcast also speaks with Dayna Matthew, the next dean of George Washington University Law School, who wrote the book Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care. She explores why an estimated 84,000 minorities die each year from inadequate care. “Because of racial bias within the health care system itself, we have unnecessary, preventable and avoidable deaths. These are due to illness that could be prevented if people had equal access to health care and equal quality health care.”
The protests of the past few weeks have signaled a turning point, says Betancourt. “It has just really led to this incredible sense from everyone of how these injustices can no longer be tolerated. People are standing up in ways that I think I certainly haven't seen in my lifetime,” he says: “And I think there's incredible potential here to drive in some real significant changes.”
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A Tale of Two Pandemics
Dispatches

One Thing Leads to the Next Robert Lefkowitz is best known for revealing the mechanism behind hundreds of drugs in use today. But he thinks of himself as a storyteller first and has a new book out to make his case.

Podcast: The Research Year That Was Medical research labs have faced a difficult stretch of closed buildings and competing priorities. Yet they have also produced milestone discoveries—and not only on COVID-19.

The Shape of Us Two milestone discoveries in protein modeling promise to change the fundamentals of drug discovery.

Universal Flu Vaccines Move Forward In the shadow of coronavirus vaccine development, another vaccine was making solid progress.

New Hope for Controlling HIV By studying elite controllers—people who are able to arrest the progress of HIV without medication—researchers have found a promising new path.

Progress on a Different Plague A novel use of bacteria could blunt the spread of dengue and other mosquito-borne diseases.

A Better Cholera Vaccine? Puzzling through the cholera antibody response may help slow a disease that affects millions of people every year.

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