As soon as the screen is off, zoom is over. I'm learning and seeing it every day outside of the classrooms.
Hello, and welcome to democracy unmuted. Today we will be discussing the Coronavirus. And as of today, December 1, there's a total of 13,447,627 cases in the United States, with the daily average going up. today. I'm your host, Kimberly Udell. And joining me today to talk about COVID is McKenzie Gilson, a public health student at the University of Michigan and a member of femur, the foundation for medical relief of children. And Mackenzie, why don't you tell me a little bit about your organization?
Hi, Kim. Yeah, so organization, the foundation for medical relief of children is a part of a bigger organization or sort of like just an act of chapter, this nonprofit actually has 60 active chapters all around the world. Specifically, this organization runs clinics in nine different countries. And our chapter specifically raises money to help fund these clinics, and help just get them certain things, they need to run that specific clinic and that specific country. So this year, actually, we're raising money for a clinic in other will lead to Costa Rica. And we're just fundraising to help the clinic by medication and different medical gear that it needs to operate. There's also opportunities to go to the clinics and volunteer, you get to stay with a host family for upwards, I think it's like three months you can stay there for but due to the COVID pandemic, there's o nly virtual opportunities, and we cannot go to the clinics to volunteer.
That's upsetting to hear. But I mean, COVID is upsetting. So since we're on the topic of COVID, while you talk about how COVID has affected your year, this year, so all learning
online has definitely been a challenge. Everyone can agree with me on that. And while that is, I definitely think that going into public health couldn't be more needed than it is today. I definitely think that so much of what I'm learning, I can see play out in real time. In any given point, what I'm learning in class translates into real life. And it's really fascinating, even so that a lot of my classes have been geared towards not only the pandemics, but also like the Black Lives Matter movement and racism and healthcare, and insurance. But there's also this aspect, where we get to really dive deep into today's problems of sorts, and really dissect them and think about how public health plays a role in each one of them. And I think it's very interesting. However, it also is very draining. Because while I talk about this every single day, I also have no break from it, because as soon as the screen is off, zoom is over. I'm learning and seeing it every day outside of the classroom. So I definitely think it's hard to do that. But while it's hard, it's also a learning experience. Because today's public health students are getting first hand experience as to how to live in a pandemic. And it's really just going to make us better public health workers of the future.
So COVID has made itself very present everyday for you the school year, leaving you drained, but with a greater perspective on the homeless in general. My question to you is, how has this affected the way you see how the government has handled COVID?
It's definitely been interesting, in a way, because I'm learning specifically in one class, where we're really dissecting how different states have handled the pandemic differently. And it's, it's easy now to look back and see what should have been done versus what was done. But in the moment, we didn't know how to handle it. It is also really easy to look at different countries even and just be able to say like, oh, France did this really well. But we wouldn't be able to implement those policies here in the United States. Not because like of the government of sorts, but because of the environment and how citizens would just they would not agree with them, they would definitely resist the policies and wouldn't follow them just because of how, how our country has been set up, versus how Fred's has been set up. And it's really interesting to just see the translation of how things are going and how we wish things had gone. But I think, I think overall, we handled it the best that we could with the knowledge that we could. And the knowledge that we had.
You mentioned policies that have been put in place in France that would not be agreed upon here. And that leads me to want to bring up a controversial policy here in the United States called the Affordable Care Act. I would love to hear more about the Affordable Care Act from someone who is learning about it daily in class and get your input on the policy itself.
So the Affordable Care Act is something that I have gone into much depth in a couple of my classes have spent a whole week dedicated to just talking about the Affordable Care Act and how it's helped. A little background is the Affordable Care Act. It's a comprehensive health reform law that was put into place by the Obama administration in 2010. The document itself is very long, very technical, and most people have not read it thoroughly. But the main aspects of the legislation is to make health care insurance more affordable for all people expand the Medicaid program to encapsulate all people with income levels below 138% of the federal poverty level, and to just lower the costs of health care. In general, as it relates to young adults, a very important aspect of the ACA is a certain policy allowing young adults to remain on their parents health insurance until the age of 26. And if you really look into the data, without the ACA, many people will not have health insurance, and many people's insurance premiums would be unaffordable to the point where they wouldn't be able to have it. I do think the Affordable Care Act is very politicized. As one aspect of the original legislation was the individual mandate that was placed onto people who did not enroll in any kind of health insurance. This individual mandate was designed to make healthy people or people who wouldn't get insurance, get insurance to keep premiums of those with pre existing health conditions lower. This was an original part of the legislation, it was the most controversial. I know it went to the Supreme Court, however, they did deem it constitutional. However, now today, we see that the Trump administration actually eliminated the individual tax penalty. So healthy people no longer face a tax penalty if they don't get health insurance. And it then makes the premiums higher and more affordable for people who need the health insurance and have pre existing health conditions. And then also, the Trump administration eliminated the cost sharing subsidies aspect of the ACA. So these cost sharing subsidies helped keep premiums lowered. And it's basically the government paying insurance companies to participate in the ACA. But in 2017, it was not I wouldn't say eliminated, but the Trump administration stopped paying the insurance companies, which then in turn, raised premiums even more than the elimination of the tax penalty did.
As COVID-19 discontinued in the United States. We've been looking for new solutions for COVID. And we've been turning more towards like back of xe. And I was wondering if you would like to take a moment and discuss any of those with us, because I'm sure you've been learning about them this semester.
So yeah, there's many companies working on a covered vaccine. I think it's one of the things that we go into class and everybody's like, have you heard about the new vaccine like it just reached phase two. Or phase three. But some important ones to definitely take a look into is, but Moderna has actually had the most success with their trial. And it's actually in phase three now. And a couple of days ago, actually November 30, they applied to the Food and Drug Administration for an emergency use authorization, which was approved, allow them to administer or start administering the vaccines. And even it could be started as soon as December 21, which is great. There's even I believe Pfizer, within the last couple of days, it might have even been today, I got approval, or asked for approval for usage in the UK, which is also really interesting. But with the development of the vaccine, we also have to look into how the vaccine will be distributed, there's really a lot to take into account, you have to think about which populations are more risk, who's more likely to actually get the vaccine, and even the cost itself, or sometimes vaccines need special equipment to be delivered or to be stored. So there's definitely a lot to think about when it comes to distribution. We definitely talk about this a lot in my class, we update each other on how things are going. But the public health consensus, there seems to be a mutual understanding that frontline workers and first responders should be the first to get the vaccine. They're the most at risk. And they're in a really important aspect in fighting the disease. But there's also an understanding that communities that have been hit the hardest also be the one of the first to get the vaccine data has shown that the communities that have the highest rates of COVID infections are poor communities, minority communities that have a large distrust in the government. So while we want to get them the vaccine, first, they're gonna have fears that they're guinea pigs, that there's like an ulterior motive for it, that maybe that it's not going to do good, it's going to do harm. It's really important to note that these populations are the populations that have seen the most harm done by governments, minorities have seen many studies research, medical professional harm to them. For example, there's the Tuskegee syphilis study. I can talk about that later. But these populations are less likely to get the vaccine if they're one of the first populations to do so. But then, while it's not just the race aspect, there's also the money aspect, there's cost to think about, like, will the vaccine be covered by insurance? What sort of have insurance? Where will someone get the vaccine? Is it going to be at a hospital, a CVS or Walgreens? And then you have to think about if there's transportation to and from this location? Is it going to be an Uber thing? Is it that transportation going to be free? There's so many questions to wonder about when planning on how to distribute the vaccine. And we really can't know how to answer the questions until we actually have the vaccine and have the knowledge of how it has to be administered if there's storage capabilities. And just really, like we just need more information on the vaccine, and we actually need to have the vaccine. So a lot of it is in the moment planning.
Hearing about the implementation and planning of the vaccine is a bit overwhelming, since a lot of it still sounds like it's up in the air. But you also brought up a study in there. Would you like to talk a bit more about the sticky study and what it is?
Y eah, for sure. So the Tuskegee syphilis study is very controversial. It took African American men and women who had syphilis and followed them throughout their lives to determine how the syphilis would progress and how it affected the body. So something that made this very controversial was the fact that the participants were not actually told they had syphilis. nor were they given any treatment at any point, even though there was a very effective treatment for it. By not telling the participants that they had syphilis, it caused them to spread it to unsuspecting people. And actually, many of the participants died because of the syphilis. This study is one of the many that has showed the medical community and the government, that they didn't care about the lives of African Americans. And it led to many laws to ensure something like this does not happen again, it's very unfortunate that this had to happen in order for us to put laws into place so that it doesn't happen. But there's many racist beliefs within the medical community, very prevalent idea is that I'm African Americans do not feel the pain the same way or have a higher pain tolerance even as whites, and so they don't get the medication they need, or they don't get as much as somebody else would need. And we know this is blatantly not true. Just because someone has a different skin color does not mean they have different biological processes. And they, they're gonna feel the pain the same way. There are other racist practices, they're independent of the medical community. The practice of redlining is very blatantly racist. redlining, for those of you that don't know is the practice of refusing a loan or insurance to someone based solely on if they live in an area deemed to be a poor financial risk. These areas are almost always communities with a high minority populations, and are not actually based on the average income of the areas. And if they are, it's not something that can really be helped by the minorities community, just because they can't get loans to move out of these areas. So they're very much pushed into areas where they can't get out. And it's very unfortunate. Racism is still very much around today and plays a huge role in our politics. This past year, with the Black Lives Matter movement, many cities and counties have actually declared racism as a public health issue. They've recognized that racism is affecting our communities, and are leading to the vast disparities and COVID cases. And that's definitely within classes. We've talked about how racism is a public health issue. And we've looked at the data that shows that COVID has affected minority populations a lot more than the white populations. minorities are more likely to be frontline workers, so they're exposed to it more. A lot of them live in multi generation households. So it's hard for them to quarantine from each other. All of it plays into each other and makes it hard for the community. But this disparity in the data really has to do with racism. And it's really unfortunate, but I do hope that more cities and even states governments, they say declare racism as a public health issue, and that we can start making our way to demolishing racism.
Next time on democracy unmuted.
Hi, my name is Lauren. My episode is called Making a home out of in Arbor. I talked a little bit to Lindsay Kocka, who's a senior and president of Michigan movement, and we talked a lot about homelessness and Ann Arbor and what you can do to help
