Over a year ago, stunned and mask-less shoppers faced empty grocery shelves. The commercialization of human relationships and needs were called into question, as demands quickly rose to distribute food and healthcare to millions abruptly losing jobs, and to house the homeless, stop all evictions and water cut-offs, and cancel debt payments. Inherently unsafe conditions called for prisoner release and an end to ICE detention centers. The global necessity to collaborate, coordinate, and administer goods and services based on need advanced a revolutionary challenge to government’s role. The Trump administration led the global charge to dash those hopes by abandoning scientific evidence, protecting transnational capital’s security at all costs, and reinforcing white supremacy and nationalism.
Fast forward one year, and though there has clearly been a shift in U.S. governmental rhetoric and even some temporary ‘relief’ measures, the governing structures and/or their absence remain incapable of sustaining an equitable recovery. Moving forward demands the accountability of those complicit in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths by refusing to distribute necessary resources, siphoning monies to corporations, lying, and withholding critical data, disproportionately impacting Black, Latinx and Indigenous communities. The ‘too little too late truth-telling’ of former Whitehouse coronavirus coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx reveals the depravity of the government’s response: “There were about a hundred thousand deaths that came from that original surge. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”
It’s not just that the U.S. spends less than three percent of funds for public health measures out of the $3.6 trillion spent on healthcare; it’s the inherent incompatibility of a private healthcare system in the face of a public pandemic. Even the word ‘recovery,’ meaning a ‘return to health,’ is inadequate in this epoch of expanding and extreme polarization of wealth and poverty. The corporate privatization of supply chains and decision making caused this uncontrolled pandemic in the first place.
U.S. Healthcare Inequity
A portrait of public healthcare in the South offers a window to a world of pain. Before the pandemic, southerners accounted for more than 30 percent of all preventable deaths from cancer, heart and lung disease, and stroke. Sixty percent of rural hospital closures and half of the 400 federally funded clinic closures are in the South. Ninety-two percent of those excluded from Medicaid expansion are in southern states. Five southern states are in the top ten of maternal mortality rates, with Black women dying at 3-4 times the rate of their white counterparts. The white supremacy inherent in the fractured healthcare system has its roots in, first, slavery’s unspeakable breeding of enslaved women for labor and, then, as Harriet Washington writes, “by 1941, sterilization had been forced on 70,000 to 100,000 Americans,” mostly women of color, as their labor became superfluous with the industrial mechanization of the fields and factories. Public health during and after slavery served capitalism.
The 21st-century coronavirus pandemic rendered workers essential and expendable at the same time. The toll was particularly cruel for healthcare workers who suffered more than 3,600 recorded deaths, two-thirds of whom were women of color, and many of those were first-generation immigrants. Disproportionately both unemployed and working low wage frontline jobs, women are at the vortex of the extreme disparities of race, class, and gender exploitation and oppression. Women also disproportionately hold responsibility for online home education of their children and the protection of aging parents from illness and death. Indeed, the viral exposures and unconsented sterilization of immigrant women at the Georgia Irwin County ICE Detention Center underscored how little has changed.
Vaccine Distribution
The horrific toll the pandemic has taken in the U.S. — with over 25 percent of the world’s cases but less than four percent of the world’s population — doesn’t end there. The lack of vaccine access globally is a clarion call for another world, both possible and necessary. High-income countries representing just one-fifth of the world’s population own half of all the global vaccine doses purchased. Without intervention, it could be years before global vaccination is achieved, if ever. The refusal to relinquish private vaccine patents is a testament to the supremacy of corporate property over life itself. Only 0.1 percent of doses have been administered in low-income countries, with North America and Europe taking 57 percent of all vaccinations to date.
Israel’s vaccine-for-data trade allowed the stockpiling of vaccines and swift inoculation of its citizenry in exchange for Pfizer’s access to all its big health data, yet, Israel refuses to vaccinate all Palestinians. Meanwhile, technologically flush and rich countries are debating “vaccine passports.” Worldwide, immigrants and refugees face profound obstacles to vaccine access. Application of vaccine passports to migrants and passport apps on mobile devices allow new forms of inequity and surveillance. Technological acceleration left to corporate ownership continues to reinforce class privilege.
Once again, the southern U.S. provides a telling lens. In Mississippi, 40 percent of COVID-19 deaths have been African Americans, but just 29 percent of the vaccines have gone to Black residents compared with 62 percent for whites. The story is the same throughout the rural South. In Alabama, a decade of cuts to public health has led to a 35 percent reduction in staffing at county health departments, resulting in only once a week vaccine administration. Narratives that put the blame for lower vaccine rates on “hesitancy” mask the truth of the role of white supremacy in healthcare, which includes lack of access to transportation, complicated online appointment requirements (even in the absence of internet), and the dearth of a trusted public health infrastructure. The nationally publicized death of Dr. Susan Moore, a Black physician, from COVID-19 was all about the racist dismissal of her symptoms, a common experience of Black and Latinx people interacting with the “medical, industrial complex.” From bias to barriers to barring, a real public health system is not just about vaccines but a complete transformation to transparent, accurate information, free transportation, home care availability, community-rooted healthcare staff, toxic-free environments, and intentional equity.
The pandemic’s beginnings and the summer uprisings revealed a growing rift in society. Humanity is at a threshold. The domination of private property, the inequality it breeds, and the State that protects it can no longer co-exist with human and planetary survival. The governance we seek is the abolition of a State where public health is no longer a form of control but a corridor to a caring society. The normal we build lies not in the past but in a future that embraces the truth that it really is all of us or none of us. RC
July/August 2021. vol.31. Ed4
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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