This piece was adapted from a post that originally ran at On the Flying Bridge on March 28, 2021.
By Michael Greeley
With great fanfare last week, DoorDash announced an initiative to provide same-day home delivery of approved COVID-19 test collection kits.
Much of the business model innovation in health care today is to move as much care as is feasible to the home. But what does that mean for the homeless?
By Molly Prothero
One of President Biden’s earliest actions in office was to sign an executive order asking Congress and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to expand the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP).
President Biden proposed that Congress extend the 15% SNAP benefit increase, originally passed in late December. Biden’s executive order also directed the USDA to issue new guidance documents enabling states to increase SNAP allotments in emergency situations and update the Thrifty Food Plan, the basis for determining SNAP benefits, to better reflect the cost of a nutritious diet today.
President Biden’s actions stand in sharp contrast to Trump, who sought to limit the reach of SNAP benefits during his time in office. In December 2019, Trump’s USDA issued a final rule restricting SNAP eligibility for unemployed adults without dependents.
By Molly Prothero
On President Joe Biden’s first day in office, he signed an executive order calling on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to extend its federal eviction moratorium through March 2021.
But this action protects only a subset of tenants who meet specific qualifications and, crucially, know to fill out a CDC Affidavit and submit it to their landlords. And despite skyrocketing COVID-19 case counts, most state eviction moratoriums have now lifted, leaving tenants vulnerable to displacement and homelessness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By Allison M. Whelan*
The COVID-19 pandemic has given renewed importance and urgency to the need for racial and gender diversity in clinical trials.
The underrepresentation of women in clinical research throughout history is a well-recognized problem, particularly for pregnant women. This stems, in part, from paternalism, a lack of respect for women’s autonomy, and concerns about women’s “vulnerability.” It harms women’s health as well as their dignity.
Over the years, FDA rules and guidance have helped narrow these gaps, and recent data suggest that women’s enrollment in clinical trials that were used to support new drug approvals was equal to or greater than men’s enrollment. Nevertheless, there is still progress to be made, especially for pregnant women. In the context of COVID-19 research, one review of 371 interventional trials found that 75.8% of drug trials declared pregnancy as an exclusion criteria, a concerning statistic given that recent data suggest that contracting COVID-19 during pregnancy may increase the risk of preterm birth.
In my introductory post to this symposium, I suggested that medicine and health tapped into a discourse of power that had the power to either harm or help. Medicine can trigger benefits in the law — what I call “medical civil rights,” where advocates rely on medicine’s language to trigger both formal legal rights and public advantage. At the same time, I acknowledged that black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), are often left behind.
In a midpoint reflection, I theorized the problem through the lens of a double bind. On one hand, medicine erases the needs of BIPOC and the harms they experience — the health harms experienced by frontline medical workers, or caused by school and residential segregation — so that they cannot access medical civil rights. On the other hand, BIPOC are rendered hypervisible in contexts where medicine continues to oppress. They are used in clinical trials and tarred with xenophobia and narratives of genetic difference. What should be done?
Several authors offer solutions. I separate them into three categories: (1) community reform, (2) social and legal reform, and (3) medical reform. Of course, all of these solutions are interrelated. Legal and policy change drives medicine; medical research drives law, society, and policy — and both are driven through community activism and consciousness.
By Osagie K. Obasogie
One idea that distinguishes public health from medicine and other health sciences is the social determinants of health. This concept emphasizes the environmental conditions that give rise to health outcomes — poverty, lack of access to resources, exposures to contaminants, etc. — rather than locating disease solely in biological or physiological processes bounded by human bodies. Following this lead, public health interventions are often focused on community practices that can improve the spaces in which people live. The public health approach is refreshingly simple: healthy communities and environments produce healthy people.
A public health framework for understanding how police and policing impact community health outcomes is necessary as we continue to have wide-ranging conversations about excessive use of force. Improving the health of local communities involves rethinking the laws that govern how police interact with the people they serve.