“We are each other’s harvest/We are each other’s business/We are each other’s magnitude of bond.” – Gwendolyn Brooks.
When Dr. Stephen Thrasher mentioned the two separate people who shared this poem excerpt with him after reading his book The Viral Underclass, I felt so much of my interest in infectious disease click into place.
Being as intensely interested in viruses and infectious disease as I have been for as long as I can remember has often felt more macabre than uplifting, but hearing Dr. Thrasher describe how viruses exist in the brief spaces of connection between us made me feel something that I am finding difficulty in explaining. Perhaps it was a sense of belonging? I truly felt that Dr. Thrasher put the reason behind my interests into the words that I could never find. I find the way that humans interact with each other and with the world around them to be intensely interesting, and viruses are the byproduct of those interactions.
Humans are social creatures. We thrive in communities, in family units, and with those that we care about surrounding us. The idea of a minuscule, invisible to the naked eye, single-celled organism being able to threaten one of the tenants of our species is fascinating, in theory. In practice, deaths from COVID-19 were not only from the virus–the United States experienced the highest ever combined rates of death due to alcohol, drugs, and suicide during the COVID pandemic. As with the virus, however, those deaths disproportionately affected a certain group of people more than any other: the same group of people who are named as The Viral Underclass. These deaths disproportionately affected poor, people of color.
Within the United States, racism rears its head in an innumerable amount of places. It seems that most issues currently afflicting our society are either caused or worsened by racism. As Dr. Thrasher discussed within his 12 vectors, and as we have seen through our studies of both COVID and AIDS, racism cannot be ignored whatsoever in the world of public health. Yet, many people–even senators–do their best to argue that racism no longer exists within the United States.
In my opinion, one of the reasons for the increasing politicization of public health is the way that it seems to be intrinsically intwined with leftist thought. How can one examine any public health issues without understanding the United States’ ever-going attacks on Black bodies? How can someone look at the amount of acute and chronic infections that disproportionately affect people who have/are experiencing incarceration and not believe that there must be a better system possible?
We are each other’s harvest, business, and magnitude of bond. We must take care of one another, no matter how hard viruses–or any other factors–may make it.
I totally agree, systems that were implemented in Jim Crow to racially segregate housing are still in play due to relatively low social mobility over the generations since. I’m actually writing a paper for my education law course that addresses this from the angle of property tax funding models for public schools. These models solidify past disparities and actually end up making them worse due to families that are lucky enough to move up a wealth class, moving to a more desirable school district and leaving poor schools poorer. This leads to inequitable education results and reinforces that low social mobility. The first steps to change need to be addressing integrating housing and equitable education funding which generally requires that poorer areas actually receive more funding not less. Unfortunately this progress is resisted due to an overly individualized culture not supporting their taxes going towards more collective benefits. It all ties into the social determinants of health that kind of stops the problem earlier in the chain of causation (and ends up being cheaper than emergency care bills at the end of the chain).
Great post Makalee, but how do we encourage this interdependence and/or mutual aid when the country is founded on this belief in rugged individualism and pull yourself up by the bootstraps American Dream? Is there a way to put the two in conversation or even in concert?