Seeking to reassure African Americans that the COVID-19 vaccinations are safe, the White House COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force united with the Black Press to spread the word.
While the weekly Black newspaper, the Charlottesville-Albemarle Tribune, is gone, the family’s entrepreneurial spirit lives on. “The environment I grew up in, my family, was that there was never just a pot of gold waiting for me at the end of the tunnel,” she said. “It’s in my DNA – to make it happen for yourself.”
Today, Americans are facing unprecedented times. We are in the midst of a global pandemic, our country has fallen into an economic recession, and hundreds of thousands are protesting police brutality and racial injustice. But there is another epidemic in this country that must be addressed, and it must be addressed now.
At present the CDC has noted that those with chronic lung disease, moderate to severe asthma, serious heart conditions, those immunocompromised including cancer treatment, severely obese, diabetic, with renal failure, or liver disease are at higher risk for severe illness. That warning should be clearly heard by the African American community. We are 2.2 times more likely to have diabetes, 20% more likely to have high blood pressure, and 30% more likely to be obese. The incidence of COPD (lung disease) in our women is 34% higher than in White women. Bottom line, if we acquire the virus, bad things are more likely to happen. That’s pass number one.
America’s airports are well-positioned to continue to fund infrastructure improvement projects without needlessly reaching into the pockets of America’s working families and robbing them of one of the few affordable luxuries available to them. Congress must stand up for working people and refuse this tax increase.
“The tax, known as the passenger facility charge, is a locally enforced but federally authorized fee that every passenger must pay at U.S. commercial airports. Nearly every airport in America charges it. The fee is currently set at $4.50 per person per leg of a trip. Legislation has been introduced that would remove that cap, allowing airports to charge any amount they want.”
The National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), the nation’s largest trade association of African American-owned newspapers and media companies, issued an urgent call and demand that President Barack H. Obama and U.S Attorney General Loretta Lynch appoint a Special Federal Prosecutor inthe wake of the police killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota.