Support for this podcast comes from Marguerite Casey Foundation, which imagines a world where all communities are represented in our economy and democracy.

The foundation supports leaders, scholars, and initiatives focused on building power for communities to shape how society works and to share in its rewards and freedoms.

To learn more about the foundation and find ways to get involved, visit them at their website, ksigrants.org and on social media at ksigrants.

Folks, we're within 100 days of the midterms and we all know how high stakes these elections are.

November 8th, we need to make sure our voices are heard and protected.

Join VotesAve America's Midterm Magnus Program and take our Count Me Inpled to volunteer, including on our July 31st weekend of action.

Get involved in the most important elections in 2022 at VotesAveAmerica.com slash midterms.

President Biden tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday. He's experiencing mild symptoms and is expected to make a full recovery.

But BA-5 is rampaging across the United States, raising COVID rates higher than at any point except for the first Omicron Wave.

Over the weekend, the WHO declared Monkey Pox a public-healthy emergency of international concern.

And public health officials in New York confirmed the first case of polio in the US for over a decade.

Finally, a new analysis by Staten News showed that the CEOs of the top 300 healthcare companies made a total of $4.5 billion in 2021.

This is America Dissected. I'm your host, Dr. Abdul-Elsaid.

The President of the United States has COVID. Again, last time it happened, it was Donald Trump in 2020. His case got so bad he had to be airlifted to Walter Reed Medical Center where he was almost intubated.

But being treated at a state of the art medical center with medications almost no one else in America had access to at the time didn't stop him from cosplaying a dictator and defiantly ripping his mask off from the balcony of the White House even as he was still struggling to breathe.

This, of course, after failing to disclose that he knowingly exposed dozens of people, including his erstwhile opponent at a televised debate.

It's been nearly two years since that point and we've come a long, long way on the pandemic. We understand a lot more about the virus, about how it spreads and how to prevent it from doing that.

We have multiple safe and effective vaccines that are authorized for people of all ages.

We have Paxlovin, an effective oral antiviral therapy which is pulverized, the hospitalization rate.

And yet, we still haven't really gotten over the politics of that moment.

Today, only 68% of Americans are fully vaccinated, just more than two-thirds. Only 32% less than a third are boosted, and by far the biggest single predictor of vaccination status is political ideology.

Rather than bringing us together, COVID and the shameless cynical politicization of it by people in power in 2020 seems to have torn the holes in our social fabric even deeper.

...