Health Equity

I know they're trying to beat us down with outrage fatigue, but it's not going to work with me. I take a lot of president Musk's violence and hatred personally, including his trying to censor scientific research on disparities in health and health care associated with socioeconomic status, including race, ethnicity and gender.  We know that rich people live longer, healthier lives than poor people. We also know that even after adjusting for education and income, white people live longer and healthier lives than Black people. As Drs. Alladina, Hardin and Rabin write in the linked article, "In recent weeks, studies that would help us answer . . . health equity questions have come under attack from the federal government for their “wokeness” and “shameful” agenda. They have, in a word, been censored. . . ."

The assault on science began on Jan. 20, when diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the federal government were explicitly ended. Days later, researchers noticed that the Food and Drug Administration had quietly removed guidance on recruiting patients with diverse backgrounds for clinical trials. And by the end of January, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientists were instructed to freeze publication, or even retract, articles submitted for publication, to check if they contained newly forbidden words like “gender.” Online tools for navigating public health databases such as the Centers for Disease Control’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System have disappeared, researchers are being muzzled and meetings to review grants at the National Institutes of Health have been canceled, then rescheduled, then canceled again.

 

Recognition of health equity is not wokeness or a shameful agenda, it is simply facing the truth, a truth I have dedicated my professional career to understanding and combating. You might as well know that I have been a member of the Institutional Review Board of Latin American Health Institute; a member of the Scientific Advisory Council, Latino Health Policy Council of Massachusetts; Research Director and Steering Committee Member ex oficio, New England Coalition for Health Equity; member, Massachusetts Department of Public Health Hispanic Births Task Force; Symposium Director for “Who Counts: The Classification and Application of Race and Ethnicity in Public Health Data,” New England Coalition for Health Equity; member, Disproportionate Minority Contact Peer Review Committee, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention;  Symposium Director for “Everybody Counts: State Policy to Eliminate Health Disparities,” New England Coalition for Health Equity; member, Executive Committee, Massachusetts Disparities Action Network; and member, Steering Committee, Tufts University Community Research Center. Much of my published research concerns disparities in health care access and delivery based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender and stigmatized conditions.

 

So I can tell you that this is absolutely real. The reason  -- the entire reason -- that the United States has lower life expectancy and worse health status than all the other wealthy nations, and even some that aren't so wealthy, is because of these disparities. If we could eliminate them, we could join the rest of the world in reaping the benefits of modern medical science and spending on public health and medical services, for which right now we are not getting our money's worth. We don't need a racist, South African Nazi to tell us we can't try to understand and solve this problem.