Renowned inequality expert speaks out about 'unequal pandemic' as bereaved families describe it – Byline Times

One of the world's leading experts on poverty says the UK is a “poor country with a rich few” and is set to fail before the next pandemic.

Professor Michael Marmot, author of many of the Government's landmark reviews into poverty, spoke at the launch of a new film about inequalities during the Covid pandemic. An unequal pandemic – The crisis has “exposed fundamental inequalities in society.”

“People have said this will be a great equaliser,” he said, “but in the past that hasn't happened… UK life expectancy has remained stable since before the pandemic.”

Robbie Akinnola's late father, Femi, “was a big fan of the rules,” says the 25-minute film, which premiered in Parliament on Wednesday night by its co-producer, Labour MP Debbie Abrahams. “He believed in the system,” Akinnola says. And the system failed him.

The film features frontline experts and families from across the pandemic, including clinician Dr Rachel Clark, who says that in March 2020, while working on a hospital ward, she experienced an emotion she had “never felt before” in her life: fear.

“We had to be brave,” she said, “but it was an experience I'll never forget. I was wearing a paper mask and a plastic apron, which was totally at odds with what was being told to the public.”

The ventilators issued to staff often did not fit their faces: “They told me I could buy my own on Amazon, it cost about £300.”

She and other staff believe at least one nurse has contracted coronavirus on the ward and died.

Prof Marmot says many of the failures before and during the pandemic are clear, with one obvious lesson being that “pub owners may not be the best people for us to buy PPE from”.

“What about putting proper funding into public health? … Do you think it would have been better to run test and trace through local public health services than the private sector?” he asked. “I couldn't think of a worse situation.”

There's a heartbreaking moment in the film when Karen Fraser-Knight talks about losing her twin sister, Paula Greenhuff. “I lost half of myself. Half of me is gone now,” she says tearfully.

Robby Akinnola had a similar experience. He said: “When I got the call from my mother saying my father was no more, my world ended in that moment. I collapsed to the floor. Everything just fell apart.”

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Francesca Michaels, from Liverpool, talks about her mother Billie Michaels, who was on welfare, dying from coronavirus at a party in Downing Street: “It was like a conveyor belt of death. My mum was put in a body bag and cremated.”

For Professor Marmot, poverty is “an obstacle to freedom…we must eliminate poverty, not eliminate environmental and social protections.”

But poverty experts say their recommendations to tackle inequality in 2020 were “ignored” by the government and not implemented.

Some figures tell the story: child poverty in Finland is 11 percent; in the UK it's nearly 30 percent. “We are a poor country with a few rich people,” he told the audience.

Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, put it even more bluntly: “If you take London out of the UK statistics, we're basically the same as Alabama. Our poor are poorer than almost anywhere in Europe.”

“We still think we rule the world. But we [European] Our colleagues look at us with increasing disbelief… The government signed up to the Sustainable Development Goals, but now the country’s politicians want to withdraw from the ECHR, just like Belarus. [European Convention on Human Rights]”…This country has gone completely crazy.”

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Prof Claire Vanbrugh said Labour had made “enormous progress” in reducing child and pensioner poverty and health inequalities, making the UK the “envy” of much of Europe in the early 2000s. “Since then we have gone back a long way.”

For Professor McKee, one solution is to strengthen democracy: “We don't have a system of accountability in the UK. If we want proper accountability in the UK we need proportional representation and constitutional reform.”

Professor Marmot will soon co-chair a new Global Group on Inequality alongside renowned academic Joseph Stiglitz, and one topic they may analyse will be vaccine inequality, with only a third of the world's population having received even one dose of a COVID vaccine.

“The US government has spent £10 billion on developing a vaccine but the pharmaceutical companies will not allow it to be given away for free,” he said.

Professor Kate Ardern declared that “there will be a next time.” As Robbie Akinnola concludes, the lesson from the film is that “we are only as strong as the weakest in our society”.

“An Unequal Pandemic” is produced in collaboration with Good Guys Productions and is supported by the COVID Bereavement Justice Organization.