Bernie Sanders Is the Only Candidate Focused on How Coronavirus Will Ravage the Most Vulnerable
The stakes of the 2020 election, already remarkably high, skyrocketed when it became evident that the COVID-19 pandemic would devastate the United States. Since then, the three remaining viable presidential candidates have presented us with three markedly different ways of how they would handle the crisis at hand.
First, there is President Donald Trump, completely fumbling the response: from downplaying the novel coronavirus’s severity, failing to enact widespread testing, and using xenophobic dog whistling about a “foreign virus.” (Arguably, he had already failed when he fired his entire pandemic response team back in 2018 and slashed away at the CDC’s budget for global health programs.)
His two main Democratic challengers, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, have both sharply criticized his leadership and mishandling of the situation. (Hey, party unity!) Both have called for the immediate implementation of free testing and treatment for COVID-19; paid leave for all workers affected by mass closures; and relief for food insecure children affected by school closures. But there is a major difference: Sanders is the only presidential candidate who makes a point to vocally advocate for the most vulnerable among us, emphasizing their humanity in a way that otherwise seems absent from mainstream political discussion.
On March 12th, in his first public address on the pandemic, the Vermont senator spoke directly and with a poignant urgency. “I worry very much about elderly people in this country today, many of whom are isolated, many of whom do not have a lot of money,” he said. “We need to worry about those who are already sick. We need to worry about working families with children, people with disabilities, the homeless, and all those who are vulnerable.”
He called for an immediate nationwide moratorium on evictions, foreclosures, and utility shutoffs, as well as the construction of emergency shelters for the homeless and domestic violence survivors. While Trump paraded healthcare CEOs in the White House Rose Garden, Sanders directed his audience’s attention to those forgotten in the shadows: “those confined immigration detention centers, those who are currently incarcerated and in jails, and all people regardless of their immigration status.”
Like his lone support of allowing prisoners to vote, there is nothing politically expedient about speaking up on behalf of incarcerated people. But Sanders insisted on it. Experts already fear that this pandemic is going to be particularly devastating in prisons due to overcrowding and existing abysmal conditions, while the alcohol content in the hand sanitizer we’re all being urged to use means the product is contraband and banned from most facilities across the country. Sanders also joined several Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren and other former opponents, in sending a letter to the Federal Bureau of Prisons and large private prison operators demanding to know how they would be handling the coronavirus. Biden did not.
As for the half a million homeless people Sanders pointed to—again, not a voting bloc he has to win over—The Washington Post reports that the current administration has not deployed any emergency funding, nor were homeless people addressed directly in Congress’s bipartisan coronavirus aid package. This is all while advocates fear that the outbreak will decimate encampments and shelters.
Biden’s COVID-19 plan, though it does address many vulnerable populations, does not mention people who are in prison or homeless. Nor does he discuss the people he mentions on paper, when he is at the pulpit and has the country’s eyes turned to him, to the extent that Sanders does.
Sanders's commitment to forefronting these forgotten populations during a national emergency is especially significant when you consider the norms of how politicians have typically talked about the poor, the homeless, and the incarcerated—when they do talk about them at all. At their worst—all the way from Ronald Reagan pushing the ugly racialized myth of the “welfare queen” to Trump threatening San Francisco with an EPA violation because of its homelessness problem and cruelly diminishing the homeless as merely “people living in ... our best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings”—they strip them of all dignity. Even when using comparatively innocuous language, like when Pete Buttigieg firmly came out against the right to vote while incarcerated, there is a refusal to consider their innate humanity while simultaneously still counting them towards congressional district representation. They’re reduced to political props and statistics without receiving any meaningful care or a nod of compassion.
It’s no surprise, then, that in his general public response, Sanders has acknowledged the broader emotional toll of the coronavirus crisis with a singular empathy and connectedness: speaking to the loneliness of being isolated, or the anxiety of having a spouse stricken by the virus and being unable to afford mental healthcare. “As people work from home and are directed to quarantine, it will be easy to feel like we are in this alone. That is a very dangerous mistake,” he warned, not unkindly. “First and foremost, we must remember that we are in this together. Now is the time for solidarity. Now is the time to come together with love and compassion for all.” Sanders has spent a lifetime preaching about the necessity of acting collectively. In a situation like this, when America’s streak of rugged individualism spells out a death sentence, calling for togetherness is not only comforting, it’s the best option we have for survival.
On Sunday night, Biden and Sanders faced off in the first two-person debate of the election cycle. It ultimately came down to a battle about whether emergency measures would be a sufficient response to COVID-19 or if this calamity, which has exposed the glaring weaknesses of the United States healthcare system in real time, points to the need for a Medicare for All plan. Biden—who is firmly opposed to single-payer healthcare and said he has “no empathy” for young people struggling in economic precarity—sees it as “people want results, not a revolution.” But after we develop a vaccine and coronavirus passes, after potentially over one million people are dead in its wake, after the economy is undoubtedly crushed and the 99 percent feel the reverberating effects for years to come, those same vulnerable people will still be the most vulnerable. There may be many more of us joining them. So if the question is “revolution or results:” why not both?
What is so deadly about the novel coronavirus is that it spreads rapidly without layman detection—until it's too late.
Originally Appeared on GQ
