Oni Blackstock, MD MHS
@oni_blackstock
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Honored to be: a primary care + HIV physician • #HealthJustice 's Founder + Executive Director • @akinfe ’s life partner 🪷 • 🗣: @ccmntspeakers • she/her(s)
Lenapehoking/landback.org
Joined March 2018
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🚨 Health care is the new battlefront for anti-DEI attacks by myself
@DrJessIsomMDMPH
@RupiLegha
"Now is not the time for healthcare institutions & professional organizations to retreat, but instead, to be ready & prepared to rebuff anti-DEI attacks."
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Shocked to see NYPD had plastered my neighborhood with “No sidewalk BBQs” signs. Reminded of a recent article on silence and “gentrification”.
Sidewalk BBQs are a staple of summer in Harlem and one of the main ways families, friends socialize and spend time together.
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Yes, it is. And imagine the *cumulative* effect over generations in terms of wealth stolen from Blk families.
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What a difference it would make if COVID mitigation measures were referred to as “protections” in the media vs. “restrictions”.
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Equality = giving every household the same number of tests
Equity = adjusting the # of tests given based on household size, whether there are structurally or medically vulnerable household members, etc.
Justice = free tests for all, accessible to all
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There’s a difference between the end of COVID pandemic & the end of the COVID pandemic *response*.
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My heart is heavy thinking abt Dr. Preston Phillips who was murdered in the recent Tulsa mass shooting.
Fewer than 2% of orthopedic surgeons are Black. He graduated from
@harvardmed
& trained at
@BIDMChealth
.
Just thinking abt how many hurdles he had to overcome in his life.
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I still remember being mortified when I was a 3rd yr med student & answered “homicide” to the chief of OB/gyn’s question about the leading cause of death of pregnant women in the U.S.
He patronizingly corrected me & said “cardiovascular disease”.
But he was wrong. Homicide is.
If a pregnant patients symptoms don’t make sense, or something seems off, you have to interview the patient without their partner present. Approximately 324,000 pregnant women are abused each year in the USA.
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When asked who owned his discovery - the polio vaccine - Jonas Salk said:
"The people. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
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Hoard vaccine, manufacture vaccine inequity, create conditions for emergence of variants, then ban and isolate.
BREAKING: EU member states agree to suspend all travel from southern Africa due to new coronavirus variant
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Saying right now that we’re post-pandemic is like saying we’re post-racial. Both are fiction at this point.
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Since 2020 (not a complete list):
DMX, 50
Biz Markie, 57
Black Rob, 52
Shock G, 57
Prince Markie D (the Fat Boys), 52
Gift of Gab (Blackalicious)
Kangol Kid (UTFO), 55
Malik B (the Roots), 47
Hub (the Roots), 62
Coolio, 59
This is premature death - life expectancy for Black...
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Research has shown that white ppl think Blk ppl are able to tolerate more pain -beliefs rooted in racist pseudoscience.
Here is a white nurse who doesn’t believe a pt with 20/10 pain b/c they’re eating potato chips.
Watch Nurse Nya explain why chips actually help decrease pain.
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“The average age of all Palestinians murdered the past month is 5 years old.”
Nothing could ever justify this devastating statistic.
Nothing.
Absolutely sickening.
It’s estimated that upwards of ~20K Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israel in the past month.
By comparison, ~70K civilians total were killed during the 20 year-long US war in Afghanistan.
The average age of all Palestinians murdered the past month is 5 years old.
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Dorothy Oliver got 94% of her Alabama town vaccinated.
I’m in awe of these brave older Black women who are taking every opportunity to keep their communities safe.
At the same time, it’s not lost on me that *the most burdened* are doing this work.
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TW: A Black women orthopedist who shared publicly that when she was a med student she witnessed an unconscious anethesized Blk male patient being sexually assaulted by an attending has now been terminated. This must be investigated & the attending & institution held accountable.
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Euphemisms for COVID:
✅Flight cancellations
✅Staff shortages
✅Supply-chain issues
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Finally unsubscribed from
@nytimes
The Morning newsletter.
The newsletter’s COVID minimzing has been repeatedly triggering especially first thing in the morning but today’s lede was the final straw.
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TW: racism x ableism:
Jordan Neely, a Black mentally ill man, was lynched this week on the NYC subway because he was perceived as a threat and someone whose life was disposable. He was literally put in a chokehold (sound familiar). His murderer - a white man - remains uncharged.
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Devastating.
The mother (55), father (59), and now, sister (33), of Atatiana Jefferson who was murdered by police have all died prematurely in the aftermath her
death.
A prime example of the weathering caused by trying to survive day-to-day in a racist and oppressive society.
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The COVID pandemic is not past. It is still here.
The climate crisis is not in the future. It is here now.
We can’t wish these current realities away.
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Unclear why, during a public health emergency, no less, public health policy is being decided by people without public health expertise.
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Friendly reminder:
Intersectionality is not just the concept of intersecting identities.
Intersectionality is specifically about the intersection of *marginalized* identities and how intersecting systems of oppression serve to further marginalize and disempower.
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This sister confronted a white passenger who was sitting next to her on a flight and texting his family about having to see next to a Black person.
She called out him out directly because she saidhe was going be feel uncomfortable as he had made her feel. So brave.
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This person w/ neurofibromatosis 1 had a video of them taken on the subway & posted to social media with a❓of whether this person has mpv/mpx.
This is not OK. Yes, there is alot of fear & misinfo but doing this stigmatizes ppl w/ mpx + other derm conditions. See her response.
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“A study found that 75% of front-line workers in the city — grocery clerks, bus and train operators, janitors and child care staff — are minorities. More than 60% of people who work as cleaners are Latino, and more than 40% of transit employees are black.”
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Dasia Johnson.
She was only 22 yo. She was murdered last wk by her abusive boyfriend who chopped her up into pieces.
This horrific crime barely made a blip in the news. Only a handful of news outlets covered it. Likely b/c she was a young Black woman.
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Wondering if anyone else who went from being in the office 5 days a week pre-pandemic to 100% work from home is wondering how they previously mustered the wherewithal to go into the office daily.
All I can think is that I must’ve been on autopilot b/c I don’t know how I did it.
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This is basically what happened when the US colonized what is now Liberia & sent formerly enslaved Black people there.
The formerly enslaved ppl ended up treating the indigenous ppl there the SAME way white USians had treated them - preventing them from voting, etc.
Had a white Jewish woman say to me that it’s just so hard when you don’t have a place to say “well this our home country.” I replied that as a Black descendant of slaves I will never know where my folk are from but not knowing wouldn’t justify displacing people.
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Wh*te supremacy can still operate even when there are no wh*te people in the room.
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This is not going to end well.
“Quest Diagnostics, one of the largest testing companies in the country, told ABC News that patients who are not on Medicare, Medicaid or a private health plan will now be charged $125 when using one of its…PCR tests.”
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I don’t want to hear another white person tell me: “I can’t imagine how hard it must be to be the mother of a Black son.”
I want to hear: I will speak out against white supremacy. I will reject my unearned privilege. I will step aside to create opportunities for Black leadershp.
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.
@DrKaliMD
’s spot-on response to a white man EM doc on TikTok who asks why his Blk pts often remain on their phones when he enters the room.
Your pts don’t trust you, doc. Just this act of going to TikTok vs asking your own pts represents a lack of integrity & trustworthiness.
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US says it’s “deeply concerned over China’s lack of transparency about its outbreak” esp. re: tracking & sequencing of variants.
Yet CDC’s shift from COVID19 transmission levels to community levels, closure of mass testing sites, has obscured the true extent of spread here.
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“We didn’t have help from the major COVID vaccine producers,” he says, “so we did it ourselves to show the world that it can be done, and be done here, on the African continent.”
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Airline CEOs should not be determining public health policy.
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“When two men who recovered from COVID-19 later sought surgeries to treat erectile dysfunction, researchers…analyzed their penile tissue and found the virus was still present months after infection.”
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This is just incorrect.
Epidemiologists, etc. and many who care about global vaccine equity have been shouting from the rooftops for a while now about the potential for variants of concern to develop.
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I had a PCR test done five days ago, & still have not received my result.
Not sure how useful these tests are if they take this long to result.
We also clearly do not have the lab capacity/infrastructure in this country to meet existing needs, let alone the next pandemic.
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"Black people in the United States, on average, were more successful [higher income] than Asian Americans up until the 1950s and 60s when the United States starting pushing the model minority myth."
Must-watch video from one of my fave truth-telling TikTokers
@circusfaery33
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This is the story of Tiffany Tate who developed a vaccine tracking system. The specs were stolen by Deloitte who created a subpar system that CDC bought. CDC had rejected Ms. Tate’s offer of her system but she has now licensed it to 27 jurisdictions.
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“Crime is a socially constructed set of norms that define what a society decides for itself they will criminalize.”
-Mariame Kaba
@prisonculture
This society has *chosen* to criminalize unpaid subway fares and we know why. It doesn’t have to be this way.
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Haiti Has Yet to Receive a Single Vaccine Dose for Its 11 Million People
We need global vaccine equity now. None of us will be safe until all of us is safe.
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This is *not* accurate.
It is not yet known where Omicron originated, only where it was first detected.
Known—
B.1.1.529 (it will be given a Greek alphabet name today) originated in South Africa and Botswana and cases have been recorded among travelers in Belgium, Hong Kong, and Israel. 3/
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Using “vaccine hesitant” to refer to ppl who have not been given the info they need to make an inportant decision is a horrible misnomer.
All my patients today were “hesitant” when I brought up the
#COVID19
vaccine but after I answered their questions they were like “I want it!”
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@ANicholsJDMD
Please ask someone else to see this patient. You should not have to subject to this racist abuse.
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Just by switching from an appointment-only to allowing walk-ins increased the proportion of Black, Latinx & Asian
#vaccine
recipients.
This isn’t rocket science; this should be me model everywhere.
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As long as capitalism reigns supreme, I fear we’re not going to get out of this pandemic.
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Me realizing that adults’ insistence on asking children what they want to be when they grow up is a manifestation of capitalism & the belief that humans exist solely to provide labor.
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It’s telling of this society’s priorities that the only holdover from the COVID PHE is….outdoor dining - not new ventilation/air filtration standards for buildings, not better employee workplace protections, not a strengthened social safety net, just outdoor dining…
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The four cases of workers being murdered for asking customers to wear masks, for trying to protect themselves and others, were all Black essential workers in low-wage jobs.
This isn’t a coincidence.
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.
@CDCgov
says mask-wearing for vaccinated people, is "a very individual choice."
It's like the idea of
#publichealth
has been completely abandoned and it's every human for themselves.
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We don’t need police in our schools, we need adults that care about our children. We keep us safe.
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My 8 yo kiddo told me yesterday after Googling my name during his coding class:
“Mommy, I think you’re kinda famous…at least among medical people. That’s what Google seems to think.” 🤣🤣🤣
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Nothing better than having your first time on the national news be with your twin sis
@uche_blackstock
🤗💕
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I didn't mention in this initial thread, but want to give a big shout-out to MEDICAL STUDENTS.
Med students were the ones that brought these egregious practices to public attention.
Med students, your advcacy matters! Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Organs of dead Black incarcerated ppl in Alabama are being removed & used for med school anatomy courses w/o family consent.Grave robbing the bodies of Black people was a commonplace practice to provide cadavers for med schools dating back to the 1700s.
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This is the perfect example of how institutions - in this case, policing and mainstream media - connect and reinforce one another’s institional racism to create structural racism.
THIS IS POLICE PROPAGANDA.
THIS IS POLICE PROPAGANDA.
THIS IS POLICE PROPAGANDA.
THIS IS POLICE PROPAGANDA.
THIS IS POLICE PROPAGANDA.
THIS IS POLICE PROPAGANDA.
THIS IS POLICE PROPAGANDA.
THIS IS POLICE PROPAGANDA.
No outlet should report this.
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@LueMfobo
I’m so sorry he betrayed your trust. What he said to you is not OK. Please report him if you can.
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From the Montreal Holocaust Museum’s website about the Bosnian Genocide: “Families were separated: men were forced to remain while women and children were boarded on buses and deported.”
So fucking sinister. We cannot let up.
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What happens when you’ve always been the one to make the rules, when you’ve never had to follow the rules, when the rules never applied to you…think about which groups of people we’re constantly seeing behaving this way because of a minor inconvenience.
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If your medical decisions affect the health of others, then your medical decisions are *not* just your business.
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Important the designated locations they mention may not be easily accessible to some residents.
Also, can we talk abt how outdoors is often a respite from the summer heat esp. for residents who live in public housing where temps inside can often dangerously exceed outdoor temps.
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How is this possible that were “out of the pandemic phase”?
We are at the same level of cases nationally as we were last July and that is likely an extreme underestimate given the prevalence of at-home testing.
The goalposts keep shifting.
JUST IN: Dr. Anthony Fauci tells our
@JudyWoodruff
the U.S. is "out of the pandemic phase."
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As a Black queer woman, can I say how proud I am to see Tracy Chapman in her full glow and radiance aging like fine wine?
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We need global vaccine equity *now*.
None of us is safe until *all* of us is safe.
BREAKING: UK banning flights from 6 African countries amid growing concern about new coronavirus variant, health secretary says
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Never at the beginning of this would I have thought we could get close to the numbers of the 1918 flu pandemic which killed 675K Americans, but we just may very well at this rate AND this is despite 100+ years of public health, scientific and other advances.
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It’s dangerous for patients and their communities to have physicians esp. those in leadership in academic medicine w/o a fundamental understanding that the social determinants of health (which are shaped by systems such as racism) are the primary drivers of health outcomes.
For a medical society, or a medical school, to prioritize "social justice" over medical expertise is to declare themselves unfit for their professional roles.
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So people who are deemed not "able to provide basic needs such as food, shelter and health care for themselves" will be involuntarily hospitalized instead of creating a society that **ensures that all of its members have acess to food, shelter, and health care**.
Breaking News: New York City will hospitalize more mentally ill people involuntarily, in a push to remove them from streets and subways, Mayor Eric Adams said.
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"In 2021, just 3% of Black white-collar “knowledge workers” wanted to return to full-time in-office work, compared with 21% of white ones....Hybrid or remote work arrangements increased Black workers’ feelings of belonging at work and boosted..."
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Viruses don't care about borders nor does smoke from wildfires.
When will we recognize our interconnectedness?
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This is amazing and shows what a more equitable & just world can look like.
It shows the library fines actually keep people away.
“The New York Public Library says tens of thousands of books have been returned since policy of no late fees was adopted.”
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So many Blk women have been dismissed like this by healthcare providers.
“I told [the nurse]: “I need to have a CAT scan of my lungs bilaterally, and then I need to be on my heparin drip.”
She said, “I think all this medicine is making you talk crazy.”
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White s*premacy doesn’t even care about all white people just the ones that uphold it.
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Hearing the new term “equity vaccine clinics” that allow for walk-in appts, are located in disprop. impacted communties, etc.
This type of access to healthcare should be **the standard**, not something extra.
That this term exists is an indictment of a broken healthcare system.
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I’ve been thinking alot abt how my mom got into med school in the early 70s b/c of affirmative action, how she was raised on public assistance by a single mom & when she arrived found her class was filled w/ the kids of professors, of folks who wrote the med textbooks they used.
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“CDC director Rochelle Walensky said “we will have a coronavirus that will lead to death in some people every season that we will then tolerate in some way.”
The critical question is who those “some people” are.”
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“Speak no ill of the dead” is a weapon that’s leveled against the oppressed to silence them, to lionize oppressors, and to sanitize their history.” - Dr.
@UjuAnya
.
A truth teller. And we know whay happens when people speak truth to power.
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You can’t make this stuff up.
“The hospital system said its incoming diversity, equity and inclusion officer was “too sensitive about race issues,” as one reason it rescinded the offer.
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.
@naomiosaka
, you were 100% clear. You don’t owe anyone access to you. We support you prioritizing your mental health and wellbeing!
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Organs of dead Black incarcerated ppl in Alabama are being removed & used for med school anatomy courses w/o family consent.Grave robbing the bodies of Black people was a commonplace practice to provide cadavers for med schools dating back to the 1700s.
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This is misinformation and it’s frustating to see what is considered the newspaper of record tout these claims.
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“I’m a peaceful person and I don’t hurt anyone. I’m asking for food.”
- a man who was unhoused on the subway train today - spent most of the time telling everyone that he wasn’t going to hurt anyone, that he was just hungry.
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What’s happening here is that govt leadership is setting this up so that all the blame falls on “the unvaccinated” vs. on the govt for not implementing what should be a comprehensive, holistic & multi-pronged response to the pandemic (vaccine + mitigation measures).
ZIENTS: “We are intent on not letting Omicron disrupt work and school for the vaccinated. You’ve done the right thing, and we will get through this. For the unvaccinated, you’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals…”
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This is necropolitics.
Mississippi, a state which ranks among the lowest in health indicators & among the highest in poverty rates, is refusing to accept $1.35 billion in Medicaid dollars to cover medical care.
This is also a state with a largest % of Black residents in the US.
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Anyone else find it odd (or expected) how few US-based mainstream media outlets covered the 2nd anniversary of the pandemic?
Almost like it didn’t happen and we’re not in a pandemic.🤔
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I have a heart condition (arrythmia) that causes me to have a very fast heart rate usually brought on by exertion or bending forward. Happens a few time a yr.
Just had COVID 2 wks ago after trying my best to avoid it and experienced my arrythmia w/o any exertion, etc.
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Very troubled abt what appears to be an emerging trend here in NYC of ppl (typically white) coming from outside heavily impacted neighborhoods (incl. outside of the city) to get their
#COVID19
vaccines instead of ppl from those very communities being prioritized & outreached to.
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This is getting ridiculous. Who will be left in NYC??
Because of the lack of affordable housing options, based on the 40x rule, prospective single tenants will have make $160000 a year, for Brooklyn, it’s about $116000 a year.
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On Implicit bias training:
“A review of 492 studies on implicit bias trainings found that while some forms of instruction were effective in changing participants’ test scores, none had any effect on their behavior.”
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“Strong recommendation” for 😷 in indoor public places during a surge is meaningless.
This is leaving it up to individuals.
We need *policies* that require 😷in indoor public and messaging that makes this clear and unequivocal.
NEW: NYC strongly recommending everyone wears masks indoors as the city approaches the CDC high alert level, triggered by rising hospitalizations. Alert later today will urge high-quality masks — such as KN95 and KF94 masks and N95 respirators — when indoors in public.
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COVID finding even the most cautious among us is because of the conditions that have been created by what to a large extent has been govt’s abdication of its public health responsibility and shifting of that responsibility to individuals.
I'm sure there will be protest about this, but these revised guidelines seem to track with how people are actually living in the face of a virus that 1) is not disappearing and 2) seems to be finding even the most cautious among us.
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“Five years ago a midwife in Kenya delivered a child with male and female sexual organs. The father told her to kill it, but instead she hid it and raised it as her own. Two years later, the same thing happened again...”
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Power is, in part, abt being able to control the realities of others.
High income countries (HIC) helped create global vax inequity and have now started banning African countries b/c of a variant that likely resulted from the same global vax inequity to which HIC contributed.
BREAKING: Austria closes border to people who have recently been in South Africa and 6 other countries due to new coronavirus variant
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So tired of the "Black women saving everyone" trope.
It's violent and ignores the systems that need to be changed so that Black women aren't doing the work that everyone else should be doing.
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This is why policies are important.
If there was a policy requiring COVID testing for domestic ✈️ travel, this person would not have been able to fly w/ COVID.
Yes, there’s personal responsibility but we can see from the pic below where that gets us.
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men is among the lowest for any demographic group (72 years old).
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Thinking about Refaat's poem "If I Must Die", I am reminded of Jamaican-born Harlem Renaissance poet, Claude Mckay's poem "If We Must Die" (which my mother made me memorize as a child) which spoke of the honor that lies in resisting oppression, even if it leads to one's death.
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The number of involuntary hysterectomies performed in the US during the 20th century are mindblowing and they include Fannie Lou Hamer who awoke from what she thought would be a minor surgery without a uterus.
#MississipiAppendectomy
More than 8000 post black women in Mississippi and S. Carolina were given involuntary hysterectomies (removal of uterus) between 1920s and 80s when they went to see white doctors for other complaints.
These came to be known as ‘Mississippi Appendectomies’
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Give out rapid tests to every household?
Yessss! Of course, we should!
That this appears to be some quixotic idea to the administration is incredibly concerning and a reminder of why we have not been able to get control this pandemic here in the US.
Jen Psaki somewhat mockingly asks reporter at the White House Daily Press Briefing if the US should be sending out rapid
#COVID19
tests to every household.
In the UK you can order 1 pack (containing 7 tests) everyday.
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Federal, state and local govt’s have completely abandoned “flattening the curve” and have set up the conditions so that millions of Americans are sickened & hospitals & exhausted healthcare workers are being inundated.
This is NOT sustainable. We need gov’t action NOW.
BREAKING: Number of Americans hospitalized with COVID-19 hits 133,000, highest since pandemic began
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