Congressional Republicans have effectively obstructed President Joe Biden’s $22.5 billion request for more Covid relief funds by demanding a full accounting of how previous Covid appropriations have been spent. In doing so, they’re implying the appropriations haven’t been spent appropriately.
Being hawks about the budget during a pandemic has consequences. A White House official said in a statement last week that the administration will have to “cut corners” and make “unacceptable trade-offs” that include diverting $10 billion budgeted for personal protective equipment and at-home Covid tests to the purchase of new vaccines and treatments. Meanwhile, the number of Covid cases and the number of Covid deaths in the United States rise.
The world’s wealthiest country skimping on Covid supplies is embarrassing.
The world’s wealthiest country skimping on Covid supplies is embarrassing. It’s also offensive in that it makes Americans less safe. But congressional Republicans can block such aid without fear of repercussions given that, according a recent poll, 59 percent of Republicans think the pandemic is yesterday’s news and 63 percent “believe the federal government has spent too much to combat Covid-19.”
That poll was conducted May 13-16, which means it began the day after Biden announced that America had reached the grimmest of milestones: 1 million Covid fatalities. Biden said Americans “must not grow numb to such sorrow.” He said, “To heal, we must remember.” He said, “We must remain vigilant against this pandemic and do everything we can to save as many lives as possible, as we have with more testing, vaccines and treatments than ever before.”
But the Republican position isn’t to do everything we can, only to do some of what we can.
The U.S. continues to average hundreds of Covid deaths every day. It should be obvious that Covid has cost us more in lives than in cash, but the same desensitivity that has Republicans willing to accept piles of dead children in exchange for unfettered access to combat-style weaponry has them willing to do a similarly macabre cost-benefit analysis regarding lives lost to the pandemic.
Though no U.S. demographic has been spared by the novel coronavirus, the sickness and deaths were unevenly distributed from the start. A study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in March found that in 2020, the rate of Covid deaths among Americans in a low socioeconomic position was five times higher than the rate among those in a high socioeconomic position; that Hispanic men in a low socioeconomic position died of Covid then at a rate 27 times greater than white women in a high socioeconomic position; that Black men in a low socioeconomic position died at a rate 10 times greater than white men in a high socioeconomic position; and that overall that year, only 12 percent of the 69,000 Covid deaths analyzed for the study were of people with “a high SEP.”
“Luckily it’s not as bad as it was before, but we’re still disproportionately impacted,” Dr. Rachel Villanueva said in an interview Wednesday. Villuenva is an OB/GYN who practices in New York City and serves as the president of the National Medical Association, the oldest and largest organization of African American physicians. She said, “Our community here is like, ‘Oh, Covid, everybody’s doing so much better, blah, blah, blah,’ but they’re not hearing that we’re still not doing better. We may be doing better, but we’re still being affected disproportionately when compared to the overall population.”
Is it paranoia to believe that the country has never fully committed to aggressively combating the virus because the death toll is so strongly associated with people who aren’t white or wealthy?
Villanueva doesn’t think so. She believes, as I do, that those initial reports of historically marginalized groups being hit hardest set the tone. “I think once the Trump administration realized that it was disproportionately affecting people of color and white folks were doing OK, I felt like it was less of an urgency … and more of ‘We have to get back to normalcy.’” And what’s more normal in this country than historically disadvantaged people dying more often? What’s more normal than people who say they’re concerned about the public’s health turning into bean counters when they realize it’s not their own who are most at risk? What’s more normal in this country than historically disadvantaged people dying more often? Across the country, we saw politicians, the majority of them Republicans, discount the advice from epidemiologists, public health experts and physicians in making decisions that included mask mandates, school openings and vaccination policy. Villanueva cited “politicians who don’t have a health background” as one of the reasons the U.S. hasn’t done a better job battling the pandemic. But that’s not the whole of it. It’s politicians who don’t have a health background and who see that their voters aren’t the ones suffering the most. To care about squashing Covid is to care about the poor. It is to care about Black people and Latinos. It is to care about disabled people. It is to care about the most vulnerable among us — who don’t suddenly become safe because news of the pandemic is no longer dominating the headlines. Therefore, when members of Congress show a dwindling concern for helping Americans safely navigate the pandemic, write it down as their disregard for those most likely to suffer.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. He was previously editor-in-chief at the Louisiana Illuminator and a columnist and deputy opinion editor at The Times-Picayune. 
