Here’s what the Covid inquiry didn’t tell you – being poor was like a death sentence | Owen Jones
If wealthy people in the Tories’ southern heartlands had died in their thousands, it would have been a very different story
That the lives of the poor are deemed to have less worth is so widely understood it feels almost trite to say it. Yet that it is as passively accepted as it is subconsciously acknowledged played a key role in our Covid-19 catastrophe. This week’s parliamentary inquiry into the official handling of the pandemic called it “one of the most important public health failures” in our history.
While, say, a sense of British exceptionalism is blamed for inadequate pandemic planning, the real reasons for this avoidable national calamity receive insufficient scrutiny. That there were “unacceptably high death rates amongst people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities” due to “existing social, economic and health inequalities” being exacerbated is highlighted: that this itself led to Covid-19 transmission being tolerated is not.
Read the original article at The Guardian