- PFAS on our shelves and in our bodies
- Fractured
- Exposed: BPA science
- Agents of Change
- Cutting edge of science
- Climate catastrophe in the South
- Cancer risk in Pittsburgh
- PFAS contamination
- Breathless: Childhood asthma
- Peak Pig: The soul of rural America
- Sacred Water
- Winged Warnings
- Pollution, Poverty, People of Color
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All these issues are tragically linked by the hardening divisions in the United States over our acceptance or rejection of expertise in science, public health, and environmental protection.
Nearly six decades ago, in 1963, US President John F. Kennedy told the National Academy of Sciences that science is “the most powerful means we have for the unification of knowledge.” He said it could help us “cut across boundaries,” to solve major problems. But today, COVID-19, climate change, and environmental injustice seem to have done the opposite by exacerbating the already horrific divides between rich and poor, cities and states, urban dwellers and rural residents, Democrats and Republicans, old and young, polluters and the polluted, the healthy and the immune-compromised, and last but hardly least, races and ethnicities.
It increasingly feels like our nation now stands at a precipice, teetering between truth and the consequences of denying it. The evidence is all around us. One respected recent survey, for example, found that 64% of Democrats but only 34% of Republicans have a “great deal of confidence” in the scientific community. The survey, conducted regularly for decades, found that the gap between the parties has tripled since 2018, when high Democratic and Republican confidence in science stood, respectively, at 51% and 42%. Equally notable, high confidence in science between Democrats and Republicans was essentially equal just two decades ago.
Beyond partisan politics
But before Democrats get on a high horse about being more sensible about science than Republicans, it’s important to note the critical holes in trust along racial lines. Black Democrats historically have much lower levels of trust in science than white Democrats. The mistrust is well earned after centuries during which dark-skinned people were “scientifically” judged as inferior, many decades during which they were abused in experiments, not to mention ongoing discrimination in becoming scientists themselves.
The US reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic only adds to that sordid history. The siting and signup procedures for testing and vaccines in both liberal and conservative states blatantly catered to wealthier and whiter families with access to cars and computers. Conservative governors were particularly vicious in ignoring science around COVID-19 protections, fighting against masking policies and keeping their economies open on the backs of essential workers who, in many critical occupations, were disproportionately Black and Latino.
Families of color are still paying the price for being first in line to get the virus and at the back of the bus of prevention. Two years after COVID-19 began sweeping the nation, Black, Latino, and Indigenous people are still twice as likely to die if infected. During the Omicron wave, the hospitalization rate was four times higher for Black people than white people. And decisions keep getting made that ignore that reality and bow instead to the emotions of privileged and more protected white people to get back to normal.
One example was the debate all fall and winter over when to drop indoor mask mandates and return to in-person classes in K-12 education. The call to end masking was led primarily by white medical experts, right-wing think tanks, and conservative commentators. Many health experts of color, joined by hundreds of physicians concerned about an equitable return to “normal,” said it was way too soon to drop all COVID-19 prevention measures as Indigenous, Black, and Latino children were still two to three times more likely to die if infected and were much more likely to live in homes with vulnerable elders or parents compromised by preexisting health conditions.
And now, the entire nation is dropping mask mandates and social distancing rules even though COVID-19 continues to cause some 30,000 cases a day, three times what White House Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci once said was the safe rate at which to reopen the nation. We are still losing 1,000 people a day, equivalent to wiping out the undergraduate enrollment of Harvard University within a week or the University of Wisconsin-Madison within a month.
Of course, part of the problem is that the United States has one of the lowest vaccination rates among high-income economies. Its 65% rate for fully vaccinated people is lower than or equal to that of many nations such as El Salvador, Iran, Columbia, Nepal, and Cuba. The Biden administration, despite its efforts to restore respect for science throughout federal government, and its pledges to account for racial disparities, has frequently tripped over itself in bowing to political and economic pressures to drop restrictions.
The cost of dismissing science
Only 22% of Republican-leaning respondents said in a 2020 Pew poll that humans contribute “a great deal” to climate change. (Credit: Li-An Lim/Unsplash)
Mistrust and dismissal of peer-reviewed scientific experts is poisoning other mortal matters. Despite the fact that more than 99% of papers on climate science agree that humans are causing climate change, the level of urgency to stop spewing heat-trapping gases is crippled by partisan and racial divides. Only 22% of Republican-leaning respondents said in a 2020 Pew poll that humans contribute “a great deal” to climate change. Only 39% of Republicans think climate change is a serious problem, according to a 2021 Washington Post/ABC News poll.
White consumers, regardless of party, disproportionately produce global warming emissions and soot while being relatively spared the environmental injustice of fossil pollution in their communities or living in heat islands and flood zones. Even if they are hit by climate disasters, white families on average have much more access to property damage relief funds than families of color.
With this systemic buffer from the worst of climate effects, only 60% of white people in the United States said climate change is serious in the Washington Post poll. Only 40% say global warming requires immediate action by the government. Such a low number is not driven by fossil fuel company disinformation alone. It is also evidence of general white privilege.
Meanwhile, African Americans, who disproportionately breathe in fossil pollution, bear higher burdens from living in heat islands and flood zones (regardless of class because of the legacy of redlining), and face much lower chances of collecting relief payments. They don’t need to wait for scientists to tell them about climate change, as billowing carbon pollution from power plants and transportation is deeply intertwined with deadly particulates. In a study published in December in Environmental Health Perspectives, Black seniors accounted for 33,000 of the nation’s 133,000 deaths in 2014 from particulate air pollution (25%), while comprising just 9% of the nation’s senior population.
Losing elders at that rate is one reason that 93% of Black people told the Washington Post poll that global warming is serious, and 62% say it requires immediate government action. Latino communities, faced with many of the same climate risks, also have significantly higher levels of concern than white respondents.
Conversely, most white people are unaware of the disparities that define climate injustice. According to both a 2021 poll by Axios-Ipsos and a 2020 poll by West Harlem Environmental Action (WEACT) and the Environmental Defense Fund, only a third of white adults know that Black and Latino communities face more pollution than they do. Only 20% of white respondents in the WEACT poll thought that environmental justice was a serious problem in their state.
That leaves a big question: What horrible levels do COVID-19, climate change, and environmental injustice need to reach before a decisive majority of people in the United States—especially privileged white people—return to Kennedy’s notion that science can lead to a “unification of knowledge,” and unified action?
Science in the balance
We already live in a society where we tolerate far too many sources of death that science has told us are preventable. These include guns (45,000 deaths in 2020), fatty fast foods and sugary drinks (300,000 deaths a year through obesity and diabetes), and tobacco (480,000 deaths a year). Richard Keller, a medical historian and bioethics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, warns that COVID-19 is becoming yet another acceptable chronic disease, because it will disproportionately afflict marginalized populations that are out of sight and mind.
“It will move out of the headlines,” Keller wrote last month, on the medical anthropology website Somatosphere, “but will remain a central lived experience and an evolving tragedy in much of the world, the US included. . . precisely in the populations that can least afford it.”
A sign that we are headed in that direction came when Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, recently predicted that once the nation reaches “good immunity,” COVID-19 will still kill “some people,” but at levels we will “tolerate in some way.”
Will we similarly “tolerate” the forecasts of death and destruction from fossil-fueled climate disasters and pollution? We already know that 100,000 to 200,000 people die every year in the United States from air pollution. A study last year in The Lancet Planetary found that we already tolerate 5 million deaths per year from extreme temperatures, which will be exacerbated by climate change.
How much longer will people in the United States tolerate the immoral political morass around these issues? For instance, the Biden administration’s attempts to elevate climate science and environmental justice into public policy are being blunted at many turns. Sarah Bloom Raskin withdrew her nomination for a top regulatory role on the Federal Reserve after a withering attack by the fossil fuel industry and opposition by fossil fuel-backed Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. She was merely following the economic science that says climate risks should be factored into lending decisions. Similar forces continue to obstruct legislation on the “Build Back Better” agenda, which includes major funding for renewable energy, addressing environmental injustices, and creating high-quality jobs.
Biden has resorted to using regulatory powers within cabinet agencies to deal with climate change, but the right-wing packing of the courts by the Trump administration threatens to slow even that to a crawl. Though the White House recently won a big federal appellate court battle against conservative states to factor in the social costs of carbon in federal rulemaking, a critical decision looms from a conservative Supreme Court on the EPA’s powers to regulate carbon.
All that is making the Biden administration pull its punches on environmental injustice. Despite the cascade of science showing that systemic racism greatly determines which communities get polluted, the Biden administration last month undercut its promises on environmental justice by unveiling a new system to identify beleaguered communities that did not include race.
In short, at this most critical juncture of public health and the fate of the planet, science and scientists have been reduced to a political punching bag. It is because the United States has forgotten—or perhaps never truly believed—that science must be accompanied by something else.
A year after Kennedy’s speech about science as a unifying force, Martin Luther King, Jr., warned that science means nothing if it is not accompanied by moral force. In his Nobel Peace Prize lecture, he said the nation’s “technological abundance” to peer “into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space,” and build “gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies” were diminished by a “poverty of the spirit” in poverty, racial strife, and war.
That was 58 years ago. The challenge and choice remain the same, and the poverty of common sense and the common good are equally glaring. Had the nation adopted universal masking early in the pandemic, for instance, we might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. If the nation tightened industrial soot pollution limits by only a small amount, thousands more lives could be saved. Combating climate change could preserve the livelihoods and lives of millions more people around the globe.
As the United States nears its one-millionth death from COVID-19 and lurches toward climate catastrophe, the moment offers us one more chance to match our scientific abundance with something currently elusive in our politics and public policy: compassion, equity, and a clear ethic never to “tolerate” preventable death. Only then can it be the unifying force that cuts across boundaries.
Derrick Z. Jackson is on the advisory board of Environmental Health Sciences, publisher of Environmental Health News and The Daily Climate. He's also a Union of Concerned Scientist Fellow in climate and energy. His views do not necessarily represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate or publisher, Environmental Health Sciences.
This post originally ran on The Union of Concerned Scientists blog and is republished here with permission.
Banner photo credit: Irwan iwe/Unsplash
I woke up this morning yearning for peace, mourning loss, and hoping for better collective wisdom to guide us through this insanity.
At the top of my inbox this morning was a note from Katelyn Jetelina, a University of Texas epidemiologist who publishes the newsletter "Your Local Epidemiologist."
She noted that posting on a global pandemic feels "insensitive without addressing a different kind of pain and suffering and tragedy that millions will soon face." I concur. Her wisdom is worth sharing:
"Just like the pandemic, many will also fall victim to mis and disinformation—a new tool that enemies have found to work swimmingly well in a time of anxiety and confusion. Please be sure to find (and share) only solid sources; preferably ones with a reporter on the ground in Ukraine. There are such things as disaster epidemiologists, so I hope they come to the forefront, too, ... to share the public health perspective of war or, more accurately, the devastating interaction between war and pandemic."
Ukraine war: Big picture
Our research team will be tracing the ecologic and public health toll of Russia's war in Ukraine. To zoom out, this tweet thread from National Public Radio puts the conflict in a larger perspective.
War and energy
With Russia serving as Europe's largest energy producer, early reporting has focused on how the global response is hindered by the EU's need for Russian natural gas. But Russia is also a major provider of nickel, copper, cobalt—all necessary materials for alternative energy sources needed to transition from fossil fuels.
Two stories of note:
Could Russian sanctions hobble U.S. clean energy push?
The plant of Norilsk Nickel in Nikel, Murmansk Oblast, Russia
Hans Olav Lien/Wikimedia Commons
Politico's Jael Holzman explores the crucial metals market—and how reliant clean energy technologies are on exports from autocratic countries like Russia and China.
Key quote, from Abigail Wulf of the resource security nonprofit Securing America’s Future Energy:
“Our concern is that our energy markets are so tied up with nations that do not share our values.”
The Coming Energy Shock
Cars lining up for gasoline in Lake Brandon, Fla., 2021
An insightful Atlantic article diving into global energy markets, Russia's immunity to foreign sanctions, and the havoc Russia can inflict.
"Any Russian retreat from world oil markets will jolt prices in ways that will be felt at gas pumps around the world."
Some good news
In dark times I often turn back to Gary Snyder's short poem, "For the Children."
I need this today, and his advice at the end is worth carrying forward:
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
I'm grateful to our researcher, Autumn Spanne, who found this morsel of good news on the website Reasons to be Cheerful:
More women than ever are contributing to the next IPCC climate report
March for Science in San Francisco, California, on April 22, 2017.
“Things are changing,” Miriam Gay-Antaki, an assistant professor of geography & environmental studies at the University of New Mexico told reporter Jessica Kutz.
“People are realizing that attending to gender is not a nuisance but something that a lot of people actually want.”
He was one of 685 people across the United States and one of 15 in Massachusetts to die from the disease that day. On April 6, Eric's mother Elmo also died from the coronavirus, one of 907 in the US and one of 12 in Massachusetts.
Both were likely casualties of a nation and state that betrayed them more than once during the pandemic: First by failing to quell the virus last year; secondly by allowing people like them to fall behind in getting vaccines; and thirdly by relaxing coronavirus restrictions while the nation remains riddled with racial vaccine disparities.
All put together, Eric and Elmo are among those who have fallen to the collective selfishness of the prior White House and the nation's governors, regardless of political stripe—a selfishness significantly stained by systemic racism.
When Eric's family emigrated from Barbados to Cambridge in the mid 1960s, their first visit to the church ended with rejection because of segregation. The barrier came down a couple years later and Eric quickly became a fixture for the next 50 years. He read scripture, assisted with communion, lit our candles, and bore the processional cross. In later years, he led a Mother's Day coffee hour where he and other men served women in black tie. For decades, up until 2019, he was a working-class warehouse manager and a concierge. For years, he also cared full time for Elmo, who was declining from dementia.
In the comings and goings that are part of many multi-generational homes, including visits from home health aides, COVID-19 got to them both. Eric was 65. Elmo was 95. They were Black. A modern wall of segregation so evident in the nation's COVID-19 response may well have doomed them the same way it blew out the candles of life for so many of the 84,000 Black people who have been lost in this country to the pandemic.
Structural barriers to vaccination
Credit: Michigan National Guard
Eric and Elmo were not yet vaccinated. In theory, both could have been vaccinated in mid-February had they been able to secure an online appointment at a mass vaccination site. Based on the liberal politics Eric wore on his Facebook sleeve, which included re-posting criticism of anti-maskers and denunciation of anti-Asian hate in the wake of former President Trump's scapegoating of China for COVID-19, it seems unlikely that Eric was opposed to vaccination.
It is far more likely that, because of his caretaking and constant associated errands, he did not have the luxury to be laser-focused on a laptop for 10 straight hours as I was to secure my first shot in the early stages of Massachusetts' maddening vaccination rollout.
All across the nation, online signups for shots have been far easier for white-collar families with fast computers and high-speed Internet. They could work from home during the pandemic at desk jobs that could allow them to peek regularly back to vaccine websites and refresh their browsers to get in the queue.
By definition, that also meant the first wave of vaccine availability was skewed toward White families. While nearly one in three White workers can work from home in the United States, only one in five Black workers and one in six Latinx have the same privilege. Rev. Miniard Culpepper, a leader among Boston's Black clergy calling for an equitable response to COVID-19, said on a February Facebook Live panel, "I don't know too many folks in my church that can take six hours out of a day to try to get an appointment."
Nor did Culpepper know of too many folks who, even with an appointment, could take the time many White families could to travel to a vaccination site. Massachusetts is one of many states that has relied heavily on mass vaccination sites such as stadiums and suburban shopping malls. In mid-February, the Boston Globe featured the dilemma faced by seniors of all colors to get to these locations.
That dilemma is far worse for families attending to seniors of color, as people of color statewide are two and a half times more likely not to have a car than White people. In the city of Boston, forty percent of residents of color do not own a car, compared to 29 percent of White residents.
Eric was apparently among the number without wheels, usually seen arriving at church by taxi or public transportation. The latter mode highlights another barrier for people of color getting COVID-19 shots—bus service is so poor in Boston's communities of color that Black bus riders in the city spend 64 more hours per year commuting than White riders.
Such compounding disadvantages for Black households were plainly on display on the first day Massachusetts opened its first mass vaccination site in a community of color—in an athletic center in predominantly Black Roxbury. Most of the people in line for shots were White, having driven in from all over the metropolitan area. Black people I know around Boston joked that it was probably the first time in Roxbury for many of those people. The collective refrain was, "They used to say they wouldn't come to the 'hood even if it would kill them. COVID made them rethink that."
This kind of debacle was repeated in many cities. The head of one clinic in a predominately Black neighborhood in Washington, DC, told the New York Times that when vaccines became available, "Suddenly our clinic was full of white people." Similarly, the chief executive of Dallas County noted to the Times how a vaccine site in a mainly Black and Latinx neighborhood experienced a "huge stampede of people from the suburbs who had reliable cars."
Vaccine disparities: the numbers tell the story
New Yorkers receive COVID-19 vaccines at New York State Vaccination Site in the Bronx. (Credit: governorandrewcuomo/flickr)
It will remain an unanswered question whether Eric and Elmo were unable to get promptly vaccinated because of some aspect of this structural racism, but the data suggest high odds. Despite more recent, after-thought scrambling by states and cities to engage churches, neighborhood clinics, and community centers to get the vaccine deeper into communities of color, Eric and Elmo died with the nation remaining far away from closing the racial vaccine gap.
Fresh confirmation of the gap came April 12 when Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Black people, who make up 12 percent of the population, account for just 8.4 percent of those who have received at least one shot. Latinx residents, 18 percent of the population, account for only 10.7 percent of those who have received a shot.
Disparities like that led her to declare racism a "serious public health threat." That officially lent the CDC's voice to those of nearly 200 cities, counties, and states—beginning with Milwaukee County in 2019— that have declared racism a public health crisis or emergency.
Even though the pandemic has long since reached every corner of the United States and killed more than 560,000 people, Black and Latinx populations, bedeviled by an array of risk factors, were the leading edge of death a year ago in the first surge of the pandemic and remain twice as likely to die from COVID-19, according to the CDC.
And yet, these populations are statistically last to get the vaccine, as White vaccination rates exceed their population share in the vast majority of states. As of April 12, according to data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), White people were 70 percent more likely to have gotten a first shot as Latinx people and 60 percent more likely to get a shot than Black people.
Of states that are at least 10 percent Black, Pennsylvania's record is the most egregious. The state is 11 percent Black but only 4 percent of vaccinations have gone to Black people according to KFF. The pharmacy chain Rite Aid became symbolic of the state's incompetence, at one point giving nearly 87 percent of its vaccines in Philadelphia to White people from across the metro region while giving only 4 percent of them to Black people (a 21-to-1 ratio), despite the fact that Philadelphia is 44 percent Black and 45 percent White.
According to KFF, other states with major Black populations and disgraceful rates of Black vaccination as of April 12 include:
- Delaware (22 percent Black population, only 13 percent of the vaccinated)
- Florida (16 percent Black population, only 8 percent of the vaccinated)
- Illinois (14 percent Black population, only 9 percent of the vaccinated)
- Michigan (13 percent Black population, only 8 percent of the vaccinated)
- New Jersey (12 percent Black population, only 6 percent of the vaccinated)
- New York (16 percent Black population, only 10 percent of the vaccinated)
- Ohio (12 percent Black population, only 7 percent of the vaccinated)
- Texas (12 percent Black population, only 8 percent of the vaccinated)
The story is worse for Latinx, who in several states have vaccination rates less than half their share of the population, including:
- Arizona (32 percent Latinx, 13 percent of the vaccinated)
- California (40 percent Latinx, but only 24 percent of vaccine recipients)
- Colorado (22 percent of population, 9 percent of vaccinated)
- Nevada (29 percent of population, 18 percent of vaccinated)
- New Jersey (21 percent of population, 10 percent of vaccinated)
- New Mexico (49 percent of population, 40 percent of vaccinated)
- Texas (40 percent of population, 30 percent of vaccinated)
Reopening policies reinforce structural racism
Credit: Baker County Tourism Travel Baker County/flickr
Gaps as sizable as the ones listed above, compounded with the fact that people of color are disproportionately represented in so many categories of "essential workers" who make it possible for disproportionately-vaccinated White people to enjoy the "reopening" of economies, make it an act of White supremacy for states to relax coronavirus restrictions. An exclamation point on this is the fact that the number of states without mask mandates has mushroomed back to 24, even though less than half of the general population has received a first shot and only a quarter is fully vaccinated, according to April 16 New York Times tracking.
It is racially irresponsible given that, as of KFF's April 12 tracking, one in three White people have received a first shot, compared to only one in five of Black and Brown people.
Thus we are witnessing a vile parallel to last year's disastrous reopenings, which were also clearly done on the backs of essential workers. No matter how much individual governors cherry-pick data to relax restrictions, cases nationally have climbed from a 7-day average of 54,000 daily cases on March 22 to 70,000 on April 15. The latter number is seven times the 10,000 cases per day targeted by the nation's top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, as being the level to consider for trying to return to some kind of normal.
Saying recently that cases were stuck at a "disturbingly high level," Fauci reminded the White House press corps of last year's tragic attempt to negotiate with the virus. The 7-day rolling average in mid-September before the fearsome fall and winter surge was 35,000—half of what we're seeing today.
"You might remember, a year ago or a little bit more than a year ago, when we were looking for the summer to rescue us from surges, it was in fact the opposite," Fauci said. "We saw some substantial surges in the summer. I don't think we should even think about relying on the weather to bail us out of anything we're in right now."
How much death do we tolerate?
A COVID patient gets treated aboard USNS Mercy on April 4, 2020. (Credit: U.S. Navy)
CDC Director Walensky has pled in vain for weeks for states to restrain themselves until enough people are vaccinated. Scientists estimate that herd immunity, the point at which the coronavirus runs out of people to infect, would be achieved at a vaccination level of between 70 and 90 percent. "I understand that people are tired and that they are ready for this pandemic to be over, as am I," Walensky said. "Please continue to hang in there."
But governors are having nothing of "hanging in there," as fans return to the stands at outdoor baseball and indoor basketball games, as indoor capacities increase at restaurants, bars, churches, museums, concert halls, gyms, personal care establishments, and bowling alleys. Air travel is soaring from winter's levels. In announcing his state's wide-open reopening plans, California governor Gavin Newsom said, "the light at the end of this tunnel has never been brighter."
If last summer is any indication, that light at the end of a tunnel is the headlamp of a viral freight train coming to mow through the unprotected among us once again. Many experts are trying to find solace in the fact that, with many older people getting vaccinated and new infections happening more among younger people, that the death toll is not as severe as last year. But that seems more like wishful rationale as we continue to lose two jumbo jets worth of people a day in the 7-day rolling average of daily deaths. States are getting back to "normal," even though, as of April 16 tracking by the New York Times, cases are either staying high or going up in 31 states, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.
One of those states where cases are high and staying high is Massachusetts. Governor Charlie Baker, a moderate Republican, last month announced a major relaxing of coronavirus restrictions, despite the fact that White people in his state have been disproportionately vaccinated. Nearly 30 Boston and state public health, civil rights, and health equity groups wrote Baker to say, "Reopening should not be prioritized while the Commonwealth has yet to address the inequities with the vaccination distribution plans and implementation."
Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University's School of Public Health, who has repeatedly criticized the speed with which Massachusetts and the nation are rushing back to normal, asked the question no governor dares answer. He recently wrote, "How many folks do we tolerate getting COVID, dying in the final weeks before vaccinations get us to a better place?"
Tragically, two answers to that question are named Eric and Elmo.
Derrick Z. Jackson is on the advisory board of Environmental Health Sciences, publisher of Environmental Health News and The Daily Climate. He's also a Union of Concerned Scientist Fellow in climate and energy. His views do not necessarily represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate or publisher, Environmental Health Sciences.
This post originally ran on The Union of Concerned Scientists blog and is republished here with permission.
Banner photo credit: Robert Kneschke/Shutterstock