The article discusses the significant health disparities experienced by Black, Hispanic, and Native Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite equal infection rates, these groups faced higher hospitalization and death rates largely due to preexisting health conditions and unequal access to healthcare resources. The author emphasizes the role of social determinants of health (SDOH) in perpetuating these disparities and raises important normative questions about justice, blame, and the responsibility to address these inequities within public health frameworks.
In the early days of COVID-19, I was a bioethics fellow at Johns Hopkins, involved in evaluating the ethics of the pandemic response.
The disproportionate rates of morbidity and mortality were due to preexisting disparities in comorbidities along with unequal access to healthcare resources.
Racial and ethnic disparities concerning all of the social determinants of health persist despite decades of public health efforts.
These disparities raise critical normative questions about justice, responsibility, and the moral imperative to correct systemic inequalities.
Collection
[
|
...
]