Health influencers reframed racial Covid disparities as evidence it only kills others

Evidence

Writing in The New Yorker in April 2020, the Princeton historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor called Covid-19 “the Black Plague,” noting, “Thousands of white Americans have also died from the virus, but the pace at which African-Americans are dying has transformed this public health crisis into an object lesson in racial and class inequality.” That is not the lesson that many conspiratualist health influencers took away, however. On the contrary, the lesson they seem to have extracted from the race and class disparities of Covid’s early death toll was “This virus is going to kill people who do not look like me.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 611

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Michelle Alexander-style analyses of how the same raw data supports opposing framings depending on audience ideology. — connects to: White Christian nationalists blamed Black Americans rather than social conditions for COVID disparities — Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian…, 133