Way back in April 2020, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted that COVID-19 deaths were disproportionately spiking in black and brown communities. Why? Because environmental racism and the wealth gap, among others, were “underlying health conditions.” Also, “inequality is a comorbidity.” Therefore, “COVID relief should be drafted with a lens of reparations.”

Two years later, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is citing a study by none other than Harvard Medical School that suggests reparations could have cut COVID transmission among black and the population at large. Reparations are curative, she says.

It’s a Harvard study, people!

No, for real. From 2021:

Anti-Racist Epidemiology

To estimate the impact of structural inequities between Black and white individuals, the researchers set out to capture the effect of reparation payments on the Black-white wealth gap in the state of Louisiana.

Their analysis, published online on Feb. 9 in Social Science & Medicine, suggests that if reparations had been made before the COVID-19 pandemic, transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the state’s overall population could have been reduced by anywhere from 31 percent to 68 percent.

The work was done in collaboration with the Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice.

“While there are compelling moral and historical arguments for racial-injustice interventions such as reparations, our study demonstrates that repairing the damage caused by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow racism would have enormous benefits to the entire population of the United States,” said study senior author Eugene Richardson, assistant professor of global health and social medicine in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School.

Ah, the Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice. We’re sure they approached this with an open mind.

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Related:

https://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2022/11/17/rep-sheila-jackson-lee-cites-study-that-reparations-could-have-cut-covid-transmission/