CDC employees take on another pandemic: racism COMMENTARY
More than 1,200 Centers for Disease Control employees recently signed a letter imploring Director Robert Redfield to declare racism a public health crisis and for the CDC to clean its own house by instituting what theyre calling seven acts of change. Among the demands is an acknowledgment that the CDC has a toxic culture of exclusion and racial discrimination and an increase to Black representation among top leadership. The letter notes that out of 30 senior officials at the CDC, only three are Black, and two out of the three are in leadership roles related to race.
At CDC, we have a powerful platform from which to create real change, they wrote. By declaring racism a public health crisis, the agency has an unprecedented opportunity to leverage the power of science to confront this insidious threat that undermines the health and strength of our entire nation.
The employees make a powerful point: Racism is a pandemic thats been raging for centuries, and its deadly. In the Black community, it takes lives through police brutality, inadequate health care and unequal economic opportunities. We saw it this spring, when a Minneapolis police officer knelt on the neck of George Floyd, an African American man, for nearly 9 minutes, until he was dead. And we see it daily in our own communities, as COVID-19 disproportionately affects people of color something the primarily white CDC leadership clearly didnt want to admit, seeing as The New York Times had to sue them to gather data related to the pandemics racial breakdown. It shows that Black and Latinx Americans are three times as likely to contract coronavirus as whites, and twice as likely to die from it.
Unsurprisingly, when the White House Coronavirus Task Force was initially announced, there was not a single Black or Latinx expert on the list, and though several people of color have since joined, the group is still overwhelmingly white (and male). In Maryland, Gov. Larry Hogans Coronavirus Response Team, convened in March, included only one African American person out of a dozen people named.
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