The inequalities experienced during pandemics

WREN member Huma Khan talks about the historic inequalities BAME people experience during pandemics and what can be learnt from this.

“The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community”.

– Susan Sontag

Crises, whether they are economic, political, humanitarian, or as the current pandemic, health related – they test us. They test us as individuals, and they test us as nations. They test every fibre of our existence from the resolve to continue within a sense of normalcy in a construct where nothing remains “normal”.

The pandemic challenges us in our professional and personal lives on a continuous basis. However, beyond the trials that we face as individuals, we face constant challenges as a society. The legacies that we will inevitably leave behind once this pandemic subsides will be preserved by history and remain a point of reference and learning for the future generations who will inevitably, at some stage, face pandemics of their own.

The suffering associated with Covid-19 is not restricted merely to economic and political fronts, however, it has presented with ethical and moral dilemmas associated with inequality and discrimination, specifically to this blog, race and ethnicity.

There has been a global rise in the open racism and xenophobia targeted towards the Chinese diaspora who have been vilified and blamed for the spread of Covid-19. These incidents are not restricted to isolated individuals, however, recognised official institutions across the globe have been partaking in such dangerous activities through political speeches, religious rallies and even within educational institutions.

Unfortunately, the dangerous precedent of blaming a specific group of people as vectors of disease, is not new. History is riddled with similar examples of this “othering” process. During the 14^th Century Black Death, the Jewish populations were assaulted and ostracised; the Irish Catholics were blamed for the cholera outbreak in 1858 with hospitals for immigrants being burned down; the Chinese population in San Francisco, 1878, was persecuted for the outbreak of smallpox. More recent examples include a prominent Congressman writing to the CDC in 2014 advising them that children from Central America imported diseases to the US.

Whilst our immediate professional priorities have been maintaining the safety of our patients through daily battles of minimal PPE, lack of testing and limited resources – there remains an urgent need to constantly challenge the inequalities that this pandemic brings on an ethical front – and the matter of race becomes crucial in this. The message that we send has to be one of equality, inclusion and be rooted in collective humanity.