The Viral Underclass

In The Thick

Futuro Media

News, Politics

4.9 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2022

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Maria and Julio are joined by Dr. Steven Thrasher, journalist and author of the new book, “The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide.” They discuss how viruses, from HIV/AIDS to the coronavirus, reveal inequities in our society. They also talk about the ways that COVID-19 continues impacting the most vulnerable populations, even as our leaders shift to a “post-pandemic” reality.

ITT Staff Picks:

“Future pandemics aren’t hypothetical; they’re inevitable and imminent. New infectious diseases have regularly emerged throughout recent decades, and climate change is quickening the pace of such events,” writes Ed Yong in this piece for The Atlantic.
Apoorva Mandavilli writes that viruses like COVID and Monkeypox “have revealed deep fissures in the nation’s framework for containing epidemics,” for The New York Times.
Joshua Gutterman Tranen writes about the harm reduction strategies pioneered by queer men of color to combat HIV/AIDS, and how that approach can be used to prevent and treat Monkeypox, for Boston Review.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Dr. Steven Thrasher

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey dear listener, a quick favor.
0:03.5	We're conducting an audience survey and we'd be really grateful if you could take just
0:07.8	a few minutes and answer it.
0:09.8	So please visit survey.prx.org slash futuro.
0:15.6	To take our survey today, that's survey.prx.org slash futuro.
0:22.8	Thank you.
0:24.8	Futuro.
0:29.8	The viruses move between different bodies and so all of us need to take preventive measures
0:37.5	to keep viruses from ending up in the bodies of people who are going to be most vulnerable.
0:46.2	From Futuro Media and PRx, this is in the thick, a podcast about politics, race and culture.
0:52.5	I'm Maria Inojosa and I'm Julio Ricardo Arella.
0:55.2	Today we have a special guest out of my home city of Chicago, Dr. Steven Thrasher, he's
1:00.9	a journalist and author of a new book, The Viral Underclass, The Human Toll, when inequality
1:07.4	and disease collide.
1:09.5	Steven, welcome to In The Thick, thank you for representing Chaitown and just a reminder
1:15.0	to our listeners.
1:16.0	If you hear strange things in the background, in the case of Chaitown, let's see.
1:19.8	We're all recording from home, Steven, it's great to have you here.
1:30.7	Your new book puts so many of the public health crises that we're experiencing, I mean
1:34.9	living in real time from COVID-19 to the monkey pox and you help us get this in context.
1:42.0	You focus on how the most vulnerable are facing not just the coronavirus, but so many systems
1:48.8	of inequality and oppression and we're going to get into that.
	...

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