During the coronavirus pandemic, public discourse generally accepted the premise that disparate outcomes among racial groups were not due to any biological differences between those demographics. Discussions instead focused on the socioeconomic and political factors that fuel health inequality.
The same cannot be said for disparate COVID-19 outcomes between men and women. Overall, men are more likely to die should they contract COVID-19. Analysis of that fact has largely clung to assumed sex-related variables around genetics and hormones and how that could potentially affect the immune system.
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The result, however, is the overlooking of one of the most adversely affected demographics: Black women, who, based on a new research paper from Harvard are more likely to die from COVID-19 than any other demographic except Black men.
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Numbers have taken on a whole different meaning during this pandemic, and we ve all been pinned to their rise and fall with a voyeuristic sense of horror.
Daily case counts. A global death toll.
But the faceless and nameless spectre of numbers masks the mourning.and stories of love, loss, and injustice.
As the Black Lives Matter protests spilled onto the streets after the death of George Floyd in the USA, Black lives are being taken by COVID-19 in disproportionate numbers. Something about the datafication of lives dehumanizes them , argues A.I ethics scholar and robotics engineer Inioluwa Deborah Raji.
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The story of Balto, the sled dog heading up the team that brought medicine 600 miles across snowy Alaska to the children of Nome in 1925, has filtered down to us as straight Disney: a kind, brave animal overcoming great odds to help kids. But people who followed Balto’s run via newspaper coverage (or went to see him appear at a department store opening or the Cleveland zoo after he “retired”) were also cheering for a miracle of modern science. Balto and his teammates were carrying a serum for the treatment of diphtheria, called antitoxin. This particular antitoxin came all the way from New York City, where it had been incubated in the bodies of horses residing in a city-run stable dedicated to the production of medicine.
PBS Airdate: February 6, 2007
NARRATOR: 1939: A chemist at a midwestern paint company makes a startling discovery, one that could improve the health of millions of people. The company wants him to stick to making paint, but this man has always gone his own way. He was the grandson of Alabama slaves, yet he went on to become one of America s great scientists.
HELEN PRINTY (Julian Laboratories Chemist) : He had to fight to overcome the odds of being a black man in America.
JOHN KENLY SMITH (Historian) : The chemical world was a club, and outsiders were not really all that welcome.
PETER WALTON (Julian Laboratories Employee) : We lived, for the most part, in a highly stressed, very competitive environment.