WORDS BY | MICHELE DARR
FIGHT FOR OUR LIVES
HOT TOPICS
“I Can’t Breathe”- Ringing in the new year of 2020 with a global respiratory pandemic, COVID 19 dominated our attention and as many of us fought for our breath and our lives, the virus and subsequent need for social distancing took hold of our daily routines. School, work, meetings, and celebrations moved to our screens. “I Can’t Breathe”. As a captive audience, we all became first hand witnesses to a second viral pandemic...and one that is sadly all too familiar. Unable to look away, we witnessed a grisly procession of high-profile, yet all too common murders of unarmed Black civilians at the hands of racist police officers: Ahmaud Arbery, who was chased down and killed in Glynn County, Ga., on Feb. 23, Breonna Taylor, who was in the comfort of her own bed when police entered her apartment and shot her dead in Louisville, Ky., on March 13 and Tony McDade who was gunned down by the police in Tallahassee, Fla., on May 27. By the time that the life of another unarmed Black man, George Floyd, was snuffed out in broad daylight on a street in Minneapolis, Minnesota, we had had enough. As the world watched in horror, Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes while Floyd, handcuffed and lying face down in the street, begged for his life, crying out the fateful words, “I can’t breathe”. 2 other police officers aided in restraining him and prevented bystanders from intervening, breathing life into a dormant human conscience. A third and far more productive viral pandemic rose from the ashes…...the pandemic of righteous outrage. The World rose up in epic and historic proportions and as of the date of this publication, mass protests have only grown in size and intensity. Whether or not you were caught in the cross-hairs of one of these viruses, you are lucky if your daily routine is only slightly impacted by their presence in our midst. Far more ominous is that the fallout for millions of non-white Americans cannot be underscored. To the degree that inherently racist systems continue to negatively affect marginalized Black communities in matters of policing, healthcare
and in literally all systems across the board, it is equally urgent to also stay informed and vigilant when it comes to the undeniable presence of those same systemic problems within most popularly marketed “solutions” to the problems, particularly COVID 19. Most media coverage has predictably been touting vaccines, with most manufacturers pledging to roll out their “cures” by year’s end. Yet these goals can hardly be justified when not yet one has met even basic benchmarks, let alone been subjected to double blind placebo trials and human testing, processes which generally take 5 years or longer to thoroughly and safely complete. History is rife with examples of the hazards and deadly consequences that result, most often in poorer, more isolated parts of the country and the world, when the process is rushed, so what is the justification and who are the authorities from which it comes? “Realistically, if we’re going to return to normal, we need to develop a safe, effective vaccine. We need to make billions of doses, we need to get them out to every part of the world, and we need all of this to happen as quickly as possible,” said billionaire Bill Gates, CEO of tech-giant, Microsoft in an article he published in Gates Notes on April 30th, 2020. One might plausibly wonder why a software mogul presumes himself, and is arguably presumed by others, to be an eminent authority in the highly subjective realm of medicine and vaccines, when he himself holds no more medical degrees than Donald Trump. He goes on to dismissively state in his article that while Anthony Fauci, who sits at the helm of the Center for Disease Control stunningly predicts the likelihood that a vaccine could be ready in as little as 18 months, Gates diverges, loftily announcing that a suitable vaccine could be ready for distribution to 7 billion people in as little as 9 months. “Development usually takes around five years,” Gates says without any noticeable trace of irony. “Once you pick a disease to target, you have to create the vaccine and test it on animals. Then you begin testing for safety and efficacy in humans.”
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