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This is our body politic.

I'm Fari Chidea.

When is a disease, not just a disease?

When we add signifiers about who is worthy of care based on issues like race, gender, sexual

orientation, and poverty, and create self-fulfilling

cycles of who gets hit hardest by epidemics.

That's a core thesis in the work of journalist and LGBTQ-plus scholar Professor Stephen Thrasher.

His new book is The Viral Underclass, The Human Toll, When Inequality and Disease Collide.

Thrasher has long studied the racialization,

policing, and criminalization of HIV. His work on that virus lays a foundation for his insights into other ones, including what the COVID-19 pandemic and other viral diseases

tell us about our society's inequality. Over a million people have died from COVID-19 in the U.S.

And despite ways that anti-vaccine disinformation actually raised the death rate for some white Americans,

black, Hispanic, and native populations still have had higher COVID-related hospitalizations and death rates.

Among other things, people of color are

disproportionately likely to have been essential workers and less likely than whites to have been

able to work remotely or relocate to avoid the pandemic. Now we're also seeing questions of

...