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When Michael Johnson went on trial in Missouri in 2015, accused of having “recklessly” exposed other men to HIV, he embodied what journalist Steven W. Thrasher describes as the “viral underclass.”
The young man had only one ally, his public defender, Thrasher writes in an important new book, “The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide.” That sole supporter was an overwhelmed and unprepared attorney who mistakenly referred to Johnson in remarks to potential jurors as “guilty” on charges that could send the 23-year-old to life in prison.
The prosecutor, for his part, aggressively portrayed Johnson, one of the few black students at the suburban St. Louis college he and some of his accusers attended, as a threat to public health. The jury found Johnson guilty under a 1988 state law that says people with HIV who don’t disclose their status to their sexual partners could face felony charges. And the judge ultimately sentenced the young man to 30 years in prison, more than the state’s average sentence for second-degree murder.
As a journalist for outlets like BuzzFeed, Thrasher delved into the Johnson case for several years. In “The Viral Underclass,” the story provides the narrative line for Thrasher’s argument: that the “isms” that define much of life in America — racism, ableism, capitalism — have not only caused some to suffer disproportionate and unnecessary, but have also led society to blame individual “bad actors” for the devastating number of viruses. In other words, members of the viral underclass are not only more likely to contract diseases like HIV and covid-19, they are also disproportionately punished for it, a process that largely absolves policies and institutions. classist and racist in the country.
Thrasher borrows the term “viral underclass” from a 2011 statement by Sean Strub, a veteran LGBTQ equality activist, who coined it as a way of acknowledging the discriminatory effects of legal sanctions and other HIV-related policies. Such practices resulted in “the creation of a viral underclass of people with inferior rights to others, especially regarding their sexual expression,” Strub wrote.
By expanding the scope of this concept, Thrasher shows that such logic can be self-reinforcing. Instead of fighting for a more affordable and equitable health care system that expands access to HIV drugs and dramatically reduces the risk of transmission, for example, we lock up single men like Johnson who have faced various challenges, including , in his case, dyslexia and economic difficulties. In Thrasher’s narrative, Johnson serves as a convenient scapegoat for the sins of society.
The stories of a few brave, virus-stricken people who live, and sometimes die, on the fringes of society are central to Thrasher’s book. Also among them is Lorena Borjas, a leader in Queens’s transgender immigrant community who helped many others, most of them transgender people, deal with police harassment, sexual violence, homelessness, HIV infection, HIV and other health problems. Hit by covid early in the pandemic, Borjas resisted health care from a system she knew posed different humiliations and risks for trans people and Spanish-speakers like her. In the end, she got so sick that she had no choice but to seek medical help. His story tragically shows how the cruelties and inequalities of our society can work to compound individual vulnerability to disease over time, as we concentrate all the various forms of prophylaxis or protection in the hands of some, leaving others almost completely deprived. .
Thrasher, who holds a journalism chair at Northwestern University focused on LGBTQ research, points out that the American response to the pandemic has been defined by unequal access to some of the best-known forms of protection: masks, medications and vaccines. However, she points out that other forms are much more diffuse and entrenched, and can be more powerful. These include quality health care, stable housing, jobs with the flexibility to work from home, literacy and computer skills. “Prophylaxis is often prevented from people in the United States if they are already considered disposable,” she says. “Then when they get infected with a virus, their diagnosis makes them even more marginalized, if not untouchable.” There are, for example, staggeringly higher rates of AIDS in the black population. Two decades after effective drugs became available, in 2015, there was a higher rate of AIDS per capita among black people than there. ever it had been for whites, notes Thrasher. This is a direct consequence not only of unequal access to treatments, but also of all the other factors, big and small, that prevent people from needing those treatments in the first place.
Thrasher structures most of the chapters around a theme: the disastrous implications when whites believe they are immune to disease, for example, or unequal access to protection, accompanied by an anecdote or personal story. At times, the book feels like it’s suspended between the memoir and the public health tome. However, the sometimes expansive nature of the narrative, and the liberal acknowledgment of Thrasher and the addition of many of his friends and colleagues (as well as his journalism and past relationships), ultimately work in the service of one of his main points: that we are all more interconnected and dependent on each other than we always realize.
However, I still wanted more depth in some places and shorter detours in others to keep the focus on what is most fresh and revealing. He could, for example, have dispensed with a lengthy retelling of the plot of the 2019 South Korean film “Parasite,” which takes up much of its chapter on capitalism.
Ultimately, this book is most searing when Thrasher shows, by the numbers and by the people, how various public health crises have been compounded in America to create the viral underclass, and then too often blame their own suffering. To that end, Thrasher’s retelling of the Johnson and Borjas stories is particularly powerful. So are his examples of how various inequities and public health concerns have overlapped so often during covid, with devastating results. He points, for example, to a report that found that 80 percent of people who died of covid in Texas correctional facilities as of November 2020 were in pretrial detention and had not been convicted of the crimes for which they were being held. . I was craving a little more original reporting and analysis of this kind.
Michael Johnson was released from prison in 2019 after an appeals court found his initial trial unfair. However, true victories on behalf of the viral underclass are rare. And Thrasher hints at just how quickly (indeed, how virally) the subclass can spread, especially as climate change increases the likelihood that new (or old) viruses will find a home in the human species. We are all more vulnerable and intertwined than we realise, he writes in an eloquent afterword, with the line between the exposed underclass and those deemed “immune” unstable as quicksand.
The human cost when inequality and disease collide
Source: www.washingtonpost.com