The drop in COVID-19 cases we've been experiencing seems to have ended last week, as case transmission

stabilizes at early November levels. Johnson and Johnson's single dose vaccine is approved

for emergency use by the FDA. They'll start rolling out early this week. And vaccines

are working. Nursing homes which are some of the first to receive vaccines have seen a drastic

decline in mortality. This is America Dissecting. I'm your host, Dr. Abdul Alseh.

I want to level with you about what's made this pandemic so gnarly. It was never just a public

health crisis. It was a health crisis tangled into an economic crisis, all wrapped up in the

shell of a political crisis. The political crisis seems to have abated, at least for now.

And the public health crisis, it's not over, but there's a clear way forward. But the economic

crisis part, that part is going to last the longest. And here's what I'm worried about. It's

common to talk about this crisis, like it's affected all of us. It hasn't. It's more like the

bottom half of our economy has just been paralyzed, while the top half was given steroids.

At the very top billionaires, they made a trillion dollars last year, a trillion dollars.

Honestly, you could fund half the entire COVID relief package with what billionaires made last

year, and they'd be as rich as they were coming into this pandemic. That's not because of

income. It's because for the first time, the stock market fundamentally decoupled from

the labor market. In April, we saw stocks soar, even though unemployment was hitting in all time

high. There's a lot of reasons why that happened. But one of them is that people with enough

money to invest in stocks aren't the ones losing jobs. The pandemic often changed where we worked,

then how we worked. But we usually still had work. And amid all that chaos, people were looking

to save. So stock soared. But the people whose jobs require going places and doing things,

cooking food or driving buses or manufacturing things, the experience of COVID-19 has been

...