71. Something to celebrate

There was a news note yesterday from the public television station in Spokane about coronavirus vaccines and tribes. In this time of political conflict and upheaval, it seems that some people in that complex and wonderful—at least to this outside observer it seems wonderful—group of government workers, private workers, and US Military in charge of developing and shipping vaccines, is putting Indians at the front of the queue!

 

“The federal government has designated an allocation of the first coronavirus vaccines to hard-hit Indian Country. Native Americans have long endured health care inequities, and they're four times as likely to be hospitalized by COVID-19.”

 

It’s bigger than that, maybe in part because the sorry state of our national political, racial, and cultural affairs is causing many of us to look back to previous government actions—critically. The truth that American Indians were decimated by infectious diseases, to which they had no developed tolerances, from the day that Columbus’s boats landed, is now read and taught in our history books. Disease was a bigger killer than European arms. I am convinced that there is genetic memory of this—and lingering genetic vulnerability to viral diseases. I have not seen any studies of Indians and the 1918 epidemic, but hope that now we might.

 

When have we heard more and more frequently about the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment conducted by the US Public Health Service? This study of “Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male” allowed unknowing men to die slowly of the disease so that researchers could take notes? The experiment began in1932 with 600 poor black sharecroppers, and went on until uncovered by the big bad Press in 1972! The very rational mistrust of government is making the Covid-19 pandemic  worse among African-Americans. 

 

But today, the continuous public updating of Covid-19 statistics is telling the world that American Indians, Latinx, and Blacks are all disproportionately getting sick and dying. And, if the blurb on the KPBS newsfeed yesterday is true, the “deep state” that some fear, the career public health and military officials, along with civilian scientists working for drug companies making and testing vaccines, are all rising to the occasion, following science and the broadest health concerns of the nation in treating the pandemic that has radically altered everything in less than a year.

 

That’s cause for some celebration.

 

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