Police killing black people is a pandemic, too
By Osagie Obasogie,
The Washington Post
| 06. 05. 2020
Black lives seem not to matter, which reveals an underlying eugenic ideology in the United States of letting disease and violence thin the herds of undesirable groups.
Photo by AJ Colores on Unsplash
Pandemics are often thought to be unforeseeable acts of God that emerge suddenly to wreak havoc on unsuspecting populations. But that’s not how public health practitioners think about them. More often than not, pandemics have a political economy behind them, in which substandard living and working conditions connected to social inequalities produce opportunities for disease to spread unchecked. That was true for the 1918 flu pandemic that started on farms in Haskell County, Kan., and it also appears to account for the emergence of the novel coronavirus.
Those social and political contexts also help explain another pandemic — one that, like the coronavirus that still rages, is also disproportionately killing black Americans. Make no mistake: Police violence is a public health problem.
Three months into the widespread outbreak in the United States, the data on racial disparities in coronavirus infections and deaths is staggering. Majority-black counties have three times the rate of infections and nearly six times the rate of deaths as their white counterparts, according to a Washington Post analysis from April...
Related Articles
By Karin Hammarberg and Catherine Mills, BioNews | 10.13.2025
The Australian fertility industry has been rocked by several recent cases of embryo and sperm mix-ups. With a lack of transparency about what clinics do to prevent such errors recurring, trust and confidence in the industry and how it is...
By Katherine Bourzac, Nature | 09.25.2025
A judge in New York rejected a request on 23 September to disqualify the use of cutting-edge DNA sequencing as evidence in a case against an alleged serial killer. The ruling paves the way for a type of DNA analysis...
By Alondra Nelson, Science | 09.11.2025
In the United States, the summer of 2025 will be remembered as artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) cruel summer—a season when the unheeded risks and dangers of AI became undeniably clear. Recent months have made visible the stakes of the unchecked use...
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 09.25.2025
In the leadup to the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to make IVF more accessible. He made the commitment central to his campaign, even referring to himself as the “father of IVF.” In his first month in office, Trump issued an executive order promising to expand IVF access. The order set a 90-day deadline for policy recommendations for “lowering costs and reducing barriers to IVF,” although it didn’t make any substantive reproductive healthcare policy changes.
The response to the...