The COVID Underclass | Dr. Steven Thrasher | TMR

Author, Dr. Stephen Thrasher joins the program to discuss the 'COVID underclass'. Dr. Thrasher's book "The Viral Underclass" sheds light on how racism and capitalism punish those who get sick.

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And we are joined Now by Stephen Thrasher, journalist, professor of Journalism at Northwestern, and author of The Viral underclass, the human toll when inequality and disease Collide. Stephen thanks so much for coming to join us. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. so I mean your book's title borrows the viral underclass it borrows from a phrase and you write this used by AIDS activists Sean Straub. and you know I know much of your work has focused on the HIV criminalization and stigma and that is very prominent through line throughout your book. Why was that frame of reference useful for you in studying pandemics sickness in general the covid-19 pandemic as well and then like as a conduit into your work the viral underclass here? Well, I had finished doing my research on the story about Michael Johnson. This young man had been sentenced to 30 years in prison for HIV transmission exposure, and eventually, we got the sentence overturned. and I'd use it as the basis of my research for my doctoral dissertation. I was thinking about how to turn it into a book when covid-19 happened. and I was looking with some of the people I work with back at my dissertation again. and saw that the Final Chapter was called the viral underclass. I was kind of ending that story by thinking about the ways that a viral underclass is produced with HIV criminalization. how Michael was an example of it. how there are other ways to think about it. and it was actually my book editor who said you know why don't you step back and think about this as March of 2020. how that might be a framework to think about covid-19. and so that was kind of the starting point that I used to think about the pandemic. to understand why it is a viral underclass that is produced between different pandemics. and I could see that with covid-19 when I just started turning to the particularities of that virus which is an extremely different virus from HIV. In almost every imaginable way that they behave differently they act differently they just had very very different characteristics. but the first people dying of it in those first months were in the sort of maps in the same zones of people I've written about affected by HIV and AIDS. Geographically politically demographically there were lots of similarities and so I wanted to understand why it is that the same kinds of human beings will end up in the pathways and be affected by these extremely different viruses.