Pandemics and Poverty - History Repeats Itself
We spent a restless weekend with the staff and board of the London Food Bank thinking through as many scenarios as we could and how best to respond to each of them. The effort was exhausting but helpful as we plan for ways ahead in this pandemic. We have over 8000 individuals to help each month (3400 families) and help roughly that same amount through the 25 other agencies we assist with food supplies.
Through the entire process of these last 48 hours, all of us have come away with the sense that, though the future is increasingly uncertain, we are committed with everything we have to be there for our community.
Especially the most vulnerable. How will they cope, considering how little of a cushion they have in their personal lives to survive in an emergency? These are people on disability, workers on minimum wage who have been sent home and customers dried up, single parents with kids now home from school and without enough food in the apartment to replace the school meal programs that were available only a week ago.
This list goes on and on, and while the rest of us are respecting the wishes of the health authorities and doing our best to be good citizens, those who are suffering in low-income are doing exactly the same thing, but with little in the food cupboards, kids with few choices for organized activities, and an increasingly sense of abandonment as our city slowly withdraws from public life and collective gatherings.
But as history reminds us, this is nothing new. Pandemics over the centuries have always hit the most vulnerable the hardest, sometimes with enormous costs to communities. In fact, it’s staggering, with lives lost numbering in the tens of millions. Cholera, smallpox, typhus, yellow fever and plagues of different varieties have devastated our human journey and impoverished all of us with the loss of so many families and individuals who were especially vulnerable because they couldn’t flee to country estates, acquire access to the best doctors, leave their physically demanding jobs in the coal mines or fishing boats, and who couldn’t get their kids into treatment facilities simply because they weren’t open for people who couldn’t afford them. History hasn’t been easy on the human race - especially to indigenous peoples - and it has been the poor who have paid the steepest price, crisis after crisis, death after death.
In fact, global health establishments have given the phenomenon its own classification: Diseases of Poverty. They are prevalent everywhere in low-income populations and are one of the major social determinants of health in any society. And here’s the kicker: a World Health Report states that diseases of poverty account for 45% of the disease burden of those countries unwilling to deal effectively with their own domestic poverty problems. And in almost all cases, malnutrition has remained a key component is all of this loss. Surviving without external resources is tough enough, but with a body underfed and under-resourced, there is little to fight off the incursions of pandemics.
I know we live in the modern world, in societies that have health plans, fantastic research capabilities, the most up-to-date health facilities and that these are part of what separate us from earlier times. But the formula nevertheless remains the same: the poor suffer the worst of any health crisis. For decades we in modern nations have succumbed to the rationale that poverty is a choice and we continue to pay the price for that blunder. It’s actually a reflection of our modern societies – what we are willing to accept and tolerate.
It is on occasions like what we are re facing now with the Coronavirus that we come to understand just how much that neglect might cost us as a people. While we hoard, others lack housing. While we work from home, others have no work at all, despite their best efforts. As many of us seek to entertain our kids now that they’re home, others don’t know how theirs will eat. In our best dreams, it wasn't supposed to be like this. There is a great discrepancy here, one that speaks to our values and unacknowledged prejudice.
And don’t think this isn’t personal for those many staff and volunteers of hundreds of agencies that are now on the verge of collapse due to lack of resources and donations. I visited two smaller eating and coffee establishments this past week whose owners once had to come to the London Food Bank in harder times. Patrons are drying up because of the rightful self-isolation recommendations put out by health authorities. They live on thin margins, with one telling me that just four days of closure will result in the end of her businesses.
And the end of her dreams. The food bank is meant to be a staging ground, assisting people in emergencies as they seek to get on with building their lives. And then this – pandemic and perhaps ruin. I left a large tip, which any of us would do in such a circumstance. She acknowledged it with a painful smile, but then offered the words that have haunted me all weekend: “Looks like I’ll be seeing you at the food bank soon enough.” She turned away in tears and I faced a weekend in torment.
We have to survive as a food bank because thousands and thousands depend on it. You can be part of that story by donating, and we will be eternally grateful for it. But when this crisis passes – and it will – we need to deliberate as a people and ask ourselves how we permit conditions where something like a virus can wipe out a disproportionate number of our own vulnerable citizens. We must reverse history, not repeat it.