As we head into the Easter and Passover holidays, the horrific images coming out of Ukraine, along with images of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock, have pushed the ongoing pandemic off the "breaking news" page. Just days away from blowing past the threshold of one million deaths in the U.S., the social media analytics that now inform news judgments have moved on to other, more profitable topics.
There is little media appetite to double back and look in depth at the pre-existing social conditions that set the stage for the COVID mass death event, in which poor people of color died at an exponentially higher rate than wealthier whites, both in my home state of New Jersey and throughout the country. The Democrats who control Congress could not even muster the moral coverage to raise the $7.25 federal minimum wage nor continue the expanded Child Tax Credit, which briefly lifted millions of children out of poverty.
