Hi folks, we are so glad that you're listening to Our Body Politics.

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Thank you. It helps other listeners find us and we read them for your feedback. This is Our Body Politics. I'm Farai Chidea.

This week we're bringing you an episode from our archive that's relevant for our times.

One of our body politics missions is to bring context to the news,

and part of that process is

drawing lessons from the past.

I hope you enjoy the show.

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

...