The Dangers of “Us Versus Them”: Epidemics Then and Now

Excerpt

As she left Massachusetts General Hospital after a shift spent caring for her patients, anesthesia resident Lucy Li was accosted by a stranger. He shouted racial slurs as he followed her, demanding to know, “Why are you Chinese people killing everyone?”¹ The persistent association of the COVID-19 pandemic with its origin in Wuhan, China has spawned bigotry and even hate crimes against Asian Americans, who have been excluded from restaurants, ostracized, seen their businesses suffer, and endured verbal and physical harassment.^{2, 3} Blaming the rise and spread of epidemic diseases on people who are deemed “different”—whether in terms of their race, ethnicity, gender, class, or behavior—is a lamentably long-practiced impulse. This short-sighted reaction fosters unproductive stigma and sabotages public health responses to these diseases, resulting in increased morbidity and mortality for entire populations. Leaders, medical and political, have both exacerbated and mitigated this response throughout history, with predictable consequences for society. …