Nurses, essential workers "sacrificial lambs" of U.S. pandemics: article

Samantha Giambalvo, a traveling nurse from Alabama who has been working in New York since April 6, and other colleagues wave as firefighters and residents show appreciation for healthcare workers at NYU Langone Medical Center amid the COVID-19 outbreak in New York, the United States, May 9, 2020. (Photo by Michael Nagle/Xinhua)

"I can't find a better word (necropolitics) to capture what was happening and what is still happening in the politics of COVID," says Beatrix Hoffman.

NEW YORK, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- America's "willingness" to sacrifice its "essential workers" both in the Spanish Flu in 1918 and the COVID-19 in 2020, especially nurses and low wage workers, contributed to mass deaths, but it seems that the lesson has not been learned, reported Yale School of Medicine on Wednesday.

"I can't find a better word (necropolitics) to capture what was happening and what is still happening in the politics of COVID," Beatrix Hoffman, professor of history at Northern Illinois University, who examined this question in her recent lecture at Yale School of Medicine, was quoted as saying.

Necropolitics is the power to determine who lives and who dies. The United States, containing only 4.25 percent of the global population, has accounted for 16 percent of the more than 6.5 million global deaths of COVID-19. "There was significantly higher mortality among younger Americans than in comparable nations," said the report.

"The research and analysis presented in Professor Hoffman's talk is a cautionary tale," said John Warner, Avalon Professor in the History of Medicine and professor of American studies and of history.

"By weaving together labor history with the history of medicine, public health, and policy history, it is in part a statement about lessons that could have been learned from the 1918 pandemic but -- like the pandemic itself -- were largely, quickly forgotten as Americans put the influenza pandemic and World War I behind them," he added.