The new Lancet commission is already making waves. Via The Guardian: US could have averted 40% of Covid deaths, says panel examining Trump's policies. Excerpt:
The US could have averted 40% of the deaths from Covid-19, had the country’s death rates corresponded with the rates in other high-income G7 countries, according to a Lancet commission tasked with assessing Donald Trump’s health policy record.
Almost 470,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus so far, with the number widely expected to go above half a million in the next few weeks. At the same time some 27 million people in the US have been infected. Both figures are by far the highest in the world.
In seeking to respond to the pandemic, Trump has been widely condemned for not taking the pandemic seriously enough soon enough, spreading conspiracy theories, not encouraging mask wearing and undermining scientists and others seeking to combat the virus’ spread.
Dr Mary T Bassett, a commission member and director of Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, told the Guardian: “The US has fared so badly with this pandemic, but the bungling can’t be attributed only to Mr Trump, it also has to do with these societal failures … That’s not going to be solved by a vaccine.”
In a wide-ranging assessment published on Thursday, the commission said Trump “brought misfortune to the USA and the planet” during his four years in office. The stinging critique not only blamed Trump, but also tied his actions to the historical conditions which made his presidency possible.
“He was sort of a crowning achievement of a certain period but he’s not the only architect,” said Bassett, “And so we decided it’s important to put him in context, not to minimize how destructive his policy agenda has been and his personal fanning the flames of white supremacy, but to put it in context.”
The commission condemned Trump’s response to Covid, but emphasized that the country entered the pandemic with a degraded public health infrastructure. Between 2002 and 2019, US public health spending fell from 3.21% to 2.45% – approximately half the share of spending in Canada and the UK.
To determine how many deaths from Covid the US could have avoided, the commission weighted the average death rate in the other G7 countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK – and compared it to the US death rate.
In another comparison, the commission found if US life expectancy was equivalent to the average in the other G7 countries, 461,000 fewer Americans would have died in 2018.
The Lancet commission on public policy and health in the Trump era, launched in April 2017 to catalogue Trump health policies, examines the driving forces of his 2016 election win and offers policy recommendations. The 33 commissioners are from the US, UK and Canada and work in public health, law schools, medicine, unions, indigenous communities and other groups.
The commission devotes as much time in the report to its namesake as it does to the conditions that made him possible.
A line is drawn from neoliberal policies pushed in the past 40 years, such as those that intensified the drug war and resulted in mass incarceration, to health inequities Trump exacerbated while in office. Many of the connections date back even further, to the colonization of the Americas and the persistence of white supremacy in society.
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