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Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway with Melissa Harris-Perry. In the 11th century, leprosy became pandemic in Europe. The experience connected moral and social stigma to physical ailment and disability. In the 14th century, the plague killed a full third of the world's population, and this black death fundamentally altered the social, political, and economic realities of the globe as the existing European feudal system collapsed under the weight of workers shortages, land abundance, and inflation. The 19th-century cholera pandemics fueled anti-Asian sentiment and stoked international tensions, while the 20th-century AIDS epidemic gave cover to homophobic public policies.

See, pandemics shape and direct human societies. Claiming lives, upending economies, fueling hatreds, but also birthing movements, reordering power relations, and altering means and modes of production. This is true of COVID-19 as well. Take a deep breath and settle in folks because there is no moment just over the horizon when the bell towers are going to ring in the town square letting us know it's over, all is safe, return to normal. Worldwide, Coronavirus has claimed more than 5 million lives. While the November 2021 curve is much flatter than November 2020, hundreds of thousands of cases are reported daily. The world we live in now is different. According to Professor Allan Brandt, this is not about living in a COVID-19 crisis, it's about living in a COVID-19 era. Professor Brandt is a Historian of Science and Medicine at Harvard University. Professor Brandt, welcome to The Takeaway.

Professor Allan Brandt: Thanks for having me on.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tell us more about what it means to say that we're living in the COVID-19 era.

Professor Allan Brandt: We all had been hopeful that this would come and it would go, and even a year ago, as we began to get access to vaccines, we had the hope that in a year or two, this would just be gone. I think we're learning now that that is certainly not the case. This is going to be difficult. It's going to be with us for a long time, and it's creating massive social, political, and economic change. Not to mention all the small and large changes that we've had to make in our lives. COVID will have and is having a gigantic impact and we're going to be dealing with the repercussions of COVID even when the infection may become largely under control.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That global aspect feels like an important part of this. If you look at the vaccination map, it maps almost perfectly onto GDP. Wealthy nations with high GDP are vaccinated up above 50% and 60%. Nearly the entire continent of Africa is without vaccination at all. Is the reason that we're living in an era instead of just a crisis because we simply didn't distribute the vaccines equitably.

Professor Allan Brandt: You can't control a pandemic disease only in some places and some countries and expect to really end a pandemic. I think the inequity in the way that we have distributed vaccines is a really telling instance of much larger global inequities which have existed for a long time. Until we can address how poorly we have done at distributing vaccines, making them accessible, encouraging people to take them, making them truly available, then we're going to be dealing with COVID for much longer than we will need to be.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Early on in the pandemic, Professor Brandt, we heard these horrifying social Darwinian discourse about thinning the herd and letting the weakest die off. Is that how pandemics have shaped the world? That populations emerge healthier or more robust and stronger on the other side?

Professor Allan Brandt: No. In fact, that's not how pandemics generally work. Although one of the things we find with pandemics is they reveal what people believe. They reveal their biases or their racism, or their notion of genetic purity. We've seen a lot of that in this pandemic and what pandemics really reveal are social fractures, our fundamental inequalities, our inability to get medicine and healthcare to people who most need it. COVID really did turn a light on, and it revealed many shortcomings in the way we've managed health and disease here in the United States, but especially around the world. If we can't get people vaccinated, what we're really doing is we're exacerbating previously existing health inequalities.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I was fascinated to read about how the plague gave even serfs and ability to negotiate for higher prices for their labor. As we're watching an American labor shortage, at least as it's being described, or the great resignation, I'm wondering if, maybe, the other side of this troubling inequity narrative about pandemics is that it also seems to have given at least American workers some greater ability to negotiate higher pay for their labor.

Professor Allan Brandt: That's a really interesting observation and I've been watching this. Union movements at places like Amazon. There are possibilities that in pandemics, there are opportunities. One of the things I often point out is that no one would have expected that we would have a constitutional right to marriage equality at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, but without the activism and the advocacy, and the forethought, all those things were triggered in part by HIV. To some degree, increasing tolerance of people who are gay was one of the ramifications of the AIDS epidemic. There are elements where we can see potentials for a more just society in epidemic like this, but we also have to be very careful that it doesn't exacerbate existing inequalities.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm wondering about the notion of an end, and if we're in an endemic phase, if we're moving to a time when COVID is simply going to be with us, maybe not unlike HIV/AIDS, something that is now certainly still very much in communities and has that inequitable impact on communities. I'm wondering how policymakers should be thinking about this. For months, before the vaccine was available, it was, wait until spring, wait until summer, wait until there's a vaccine. If this is just life now, should we be thinking about how we just now live life with this communicable disease?

Professor Allan Brandt: Well, I think that is what is going to happen. There are issues for all of us personally, what's the level of risk we're willing to take? Are we back on airplanes? Do we dine indoors? Do we go to big indoor concerts? All of us will be asking those questions, but from a public policy point of view, we really want to make sure that we have reduced infections and deaths, and hospitalizations as much as possible. This will require continuing to use masks. It will require raising our rates of vaccines and making sure they're accessible to anyone. We will be living in a phase of considerable uncertainty that was not part of our world before.

What we know about preparedness and preventing deaths is that the healthier we are as a country and a world, the less vulnerable we are to infections like COVID-19.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Professor Allan Brandt, Historian of Science and Medicine at Harvard University, thank you for joining us.

Professor Allan Brandt: Thank you.

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