Channel 4’s decision to show a documentary provocatively titled: ‘Is Covid Racist’ tonight is neither clever nor appropriate argues Matthew Steeples
In a move plainly designed to engender themselves to the ‘woke’ generation at the same time as seeking to stoke the fury of Laurence Fox and the dregs of whatever, if anything, that is left of the BNP, tonight at 9pm Channel 4 will show a 60-minute documentary titled Is Covid Racist?
Whilst statistics have consistently shown cases of coronavirus to have been proportionally higher in some areas of the country with higher BAME population percentages, this show will seek to highlight how “Covid-19 has killed a higher number of people of colour among Britain’s frontline National Health Service workers,” according to Television Business International.
Of this, Channel 4’s commissioning editor for factual, Harjeet Chhokar, concluded: “We don’t really know why,” but in so doing entirely misses the point. Even if Covid-19 is actually more prevalent in one community or ethnicity over another, that does not make it “racist” as to be “racist” is a personal choice and one of personal prejudice.
Nobody in their right mind – whatever their colour or creed unless they were a halfwit with a desire to drink bleach – would opt to infect themselves with this potentially deadly disease and thus Channel 4 should be jolly well ashamed of yet again heading down the road of political correctness gone crackers.
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Absolutely right! Viruses don’t care who they infect, whatever their race. The program mixed together two quite different issues – infectivity and progression of the disease. And yes, some social conditions DO apply – but mainly to the first. Tight-knit or crowded community conditions do indeed make cross-infection more likely, and may even affect how severely an infection may be for someone who has poor nutrition.
But when it comes to how severely BAME people actually react to that infection, this is almost completely independent of whether they’re ‘disadvantaged’ or hungry. Many Black and brown top specialists in the NHS (and many other health services elsewhere – including Africa and South Asia, incidentally – die more often with Covid infections that white ones. The key medical research finding is that death is far more likely depending on the vitamin D status of the infected person, a finding repeated often and desperately by many top-line medical researchers around the world.
Yet here in the UK Public Health England absolutely refuses to listen, even when these front-line workers report they find patients far more resistant to Covid progression, regardless of skin colour, provided they have good vitamin D status. And that applies equally to the elderly – of all colours. Darker skinned people have seriously less vitamin D in their blood than light skinned people, and older folk also have declining levels – both groups are at the highest risk of actually dying from Covid infection, regardless of their social status.
This program clearly set out to ‘prove’ that the difference between the ethnic groups is absolutely and and solely down to prejudice and disadvantage. It rigidly avoided any mention of the medical science evidence of the role of vitamin D, as also the plight of the elderly (of all races, incidentally.). It was a depression example of the sociological bias and political correctness that infests such of current medical thinking. Our Secretary of State for Health, Matt Hancock – utterly without any science or medical qualifications at all – even invented a non-existent ‘Clinical Trial’ that, he said, proved that vitamin D doesn’t have anything to do with this question, and later had to admit that it didn’t exist!
Yet recognising that there’s something in this after all, and taking the absurdly simple and cheap course of supplementing the supply of vitamin D of those most at risk could have remarkably beneficial effects – and those most to benefit would be the BAME communities themselves.