Public Health, Inequality and COVID 19

Panel overview

In order to deepen public understanding of the health dimensions of the current crisis, this panel addresses public access to healthcare and social justice issues associated with COVID 19, as well as the precarity of the broader system that this pandemic makes more visible. Presenters, including analysts and activists of the health care system and physicians from Canada and the US, discuss how they see COVID affecting their community and/or area/region of research, including how health care cuts or insufficient access to publicly funded medicine and employment insecurity influence our healthcare systems’ ability to respond. They also identify potential transformative outcomes arising from the pandemic, and discuss the ongoing work required to build those outcomes.

Find a list of works cited during the panel at the bottom of this page.

Speakers

Tracey Osborne, Facillitator

Dr. Tracey Osborne an associate professor and Presidential Chair in the Management of Complex Systems Department at the University of California, Merced. Her research focuses on the social and political economic dimensions of climate change mitigation in tropical forests and the role of Indigenous Peoples, the politics of climate finance, global environmental governance, and climate equity and justice.

Natalie Mehra

Natalie Mehra has been the executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition for 20 years. She has built the Health Coalition into the largest a broadest public interest group on health care in the province, representing more than half-a-million Ontarians in its network of more than 400 member organizations and more than 50 local chapters. She is a past Board Member of the Canadian Health Coalition where she spearheaded numerous national campaigns to safeguard and improve single-tier public medicare.

Abigail Neely

Abigail (Abby) Neely is an assistant professor of Geography at Dartmouth College. She is a political ecologist who studies health, which means she understands health as sitting at the interface of biological, political-economic, and cultural processes. Most of her work is in rural South Africa. In addition, these days she’s a first-grade teacher and daycare provider.

Rupa Marya

Rupa Marya, M.D., is an associate professor of medicine at University of California San Francisco, faculty director of the Do No Harm Coalition and a leading figure at the intersection of medicine and social justice. Rupa investigates the health effects of police violence on communities through The Justice Study and is helping set up the Mni Wiconi free community clinic under Lakota leadership at Standing Rock. She is also the leader of the internationally touring band Rupa and the April Fishes.

Patricia Lopez

Patricia Lopez is an assistant professor Geography at Dartmouth College. Her work centers on the ways that lives are differentially valued and the material impacts of these valuations, through the lens of care and care ethics.

Works cited in discussion

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University of California Merced

York University

University of Washington