Tag: economic inequality

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Georgia, Atlanta USA March 6, 2020.

The Politics of CDC Public Health Guidance During COVID-19

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

A version of this post first ran in Ms. Magazine on October 28, 2020. It has been adapted slightly for Bill of Health. 

By Aziza Ahmed

In recent months, public health guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has become a site of political reckoning.

The agency has taken an enormous amount of heat from a range of institutions, including the executive and the public, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The former has sought to intervene in public health guidance to ensure that the CDC presents the President and administration’s response to COVID-19 in a positive light. The latter consists of opposed factions that demand more rigorous guidance, or, its opposite, less stringent advice.

Importantly, these tensions have revealed how communities experience the pandemic differently. CDC guidance has produced divergent consequences, largely depending on demographics. These differences have been particularly pronounced along racial lines.

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Grocery store.

COVID-19 Highlights the Vital Connection Between Food and Health

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Browne C. Lewis

Together, food insecurity and COVID-19 have proven to be a deadly combination for Black and Brown people.

Data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that COVID-19 hospitalization rates among Black and Latino populations have been approximately 4.7 times the rate of their white peers. The CDC suggests that a key driver of these disparities are inequities in the social determinants of health.

Healthy People 2020 defines social determinants of health as “conditions in the environments in which people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks.” The lack of access to good quality food is one of the main social determinants of health. People who eat unhealthy food are more likely to have diet-related medical conditions, like hypertension and diabetes, that make them more susceptible to developing severe or fatal COVID-19.

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Janitor mopping floor in hallway office building or walkway after school and classroom silhouette work job with sun light background.

Overworked, Overlooked, and Unprotected: Domestic Workers and COVID-19

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Mariah A. Lindsay*

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected communities already facing multiple oppressions, including women, people of color, people living with low incomes, and immigrants.

This post focuses on the impacts of the pandemic on a group that encompasses many of these identities: domestic workers, such as home health care workers, house cleaners, and child care workers.

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a crowd of people shuffling through a sidewalk

COVID-19 Immunity as Passport to Work Will Increase Economic Inequality

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Ifeoma Ajunwa

As scientists develop increasingly accurate tests for COVID-19 immunity, we must be on guard as to potential inequities arising from their use, particularly with respect to their potential application as a prerequisite for returning to the workplace.

A focus on immunity as a yardstick for return to work will only serve to widen the gulf of economic inequality, especially in countries like the U.S., which has severe racial health care disparities and uneven access to effective healthcare. This focus could also serve to diminish societal support for further understanding and curtailing the disease.

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Photo of a globe with a bandage tied around it

Struggles for Human Rights in Health in an Age of Neoliberalism: From Civil Disobedience to Epistemic Disobedience

Alicia Ely Yamin Leave a comment

This is the abstract of a paper by Alicia Ely Yamin. You can read the full paper in the Journal of Human Rights Practice here.

By Alicia Ely Yamin

Abstract

Like other contributors to this special issue and beyond, I believe we are at a critical inflection point in human rights and need to re-energize our work broadly to address growing economic inequality as well as inequalities based on different axes of identity. In relation to the constellation of fields involved in ‘health and human rights’ specifically—which link distinct communities with dissonant values, methods and orthodoxies—I argue that we also need to challenge ideas that are taken for granted in the fields that we are trying to transform. After setting out a personal and subjective account of why human rights-based approaches (HRBAs) are unlikely to be meaningful tools for social change as they are now generally being deployed, I suggest we collectively—scholars, practitioners and advocates—need to grapple with how to think about: (1) biomedicine in relation to the social as well as biological nature of health and well-being; and (2) conventional public health in relation to the social construction of health within and across borders and health systems. In each case, I suggest that challenging accepted truths in different disciplines, and in turn in the political economy of global health, have dramatic implications for not just theory but informing different strategies for advancing health (and social) justice through rights in practice.