Ali Noorani [00:00:11] This week, we launch a timely new series: Why Equity is Key to Pandemic Recovery.
Laura Spinney [00:00:24] And you need a kind of cohesive policy to deal with the fact that viruses travel with people. And if you make some people in your society invisible, you’ve got a problem. And that’s why, you know, we come back to this idea of a pandemic holding up a mirror to society because it’s the whole society that the virus attacks and it goes for its weak points. And we see that again and again.
Laura Spinney [00:00:47] From the National Immigration Forum. I’m Ali Noorani. And this is only in America. With a covid-19 vaccine gradually making headway an end the pandemic feels like a tangible, if still distant, spot on the horizon. But the pandemic is really far from over, and the success of our response and recovery depends heavily on how we approach these next few months. We need to prioritize vulnerable populations for vaccination. But more than that, we need to make sure that they have the information, resources and guarantee of safety that they need in order to feel comfortable coming forward. Over the course of this series, we’re going to talk to a range of experts at the global, national and local level about how immigrant communities need to be engaged in what we hope are the final stages of the pandemic. Because the fact is that throughout the pandemic, we’ve seen just how essential immigrant communities are to pretty much every aspect of our lives, from farm workers, to doctors, to domestic workers, to scientists, immigrants are essential. And this essential work, on top of barriers to health care access, have put them at greater risk of catching the virus itself. The combination of essential work and increased risk makes it pretty clear that a successful pandemic recovery approach needs to take the immigrant experience into account. And that experience of the last four years has been pretty awful because so many of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies have driven immigrants further away from health systems, all of which makes information and access a formidable task when we engage in rhetoric and policies that make immigrants less likely to come forward, we put everyone at risk. So we need to ensure that immigration status is not a barrier to the vaccine and create the conditions that allow those communities to feel safe coming forward.
Underwriting [00:03:10] Support for the National Immigration Forum comes from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, supporting innovations in education, democratic engagement and strengthening international peace and security and from Humanity United. When humanity is united, we can bring a powerful force for human dignity.
Ali Noorani [00:03:34] My guest this week is Laura Spinney. Laura is both a science journalist and a novelist, and while did talk about that a bit, we really talked about her 2017 book, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. It’s an amazing book that I highly recommend. In Pale Rider, Laura lays out how the 1918 pandemic impacted to the 20th century had had. Its consequences can still be felt today. And in the conversation, while she cautions against close comparisons, there’s still a lot that the experiences in 1918 can teach us about what we’re facing in 2021. In fact, Laura recently wrote an op ed for The Guardian explaining why a successful recovery from our current pandemic means prioritizing immigrant communities. And this week she graciously agreed to sit down for a conversation about it. Laura, thank you so, so much for joining me. I really, really appreciate your time and everything that you’re doing. So thank you.
Laura Spinney [00:04:31] It’s a pleasure to be here.
Ali Noorani [00:04:32] So before we get into the work and your perspective and your expertize on the issues that are dominating the news in terms of the pandemic, tell me a little bit about yourself. How did you get where you are today? What led you to become a science author, the novelist?
Laura Spinney [00:04:49] Well, that goes back a long way. I love to write. I studied science at university and I kind of thought I explored different areas of journalism when I was much younger, and I did some fashion journalism. I even write for a newspaper in the U.K. called the Catholic Herald, even though I’m not Catholic or religious. But that was quite a learning experience. And eventually I kind of gravitated back to the subject that I’d studied science because it struck me as something that would never, ever be boring and always be new stories to discuss and write about. It wouldn’t be the same old themes every year. So that’s where I went. And I guess the novel writing was a kind of antidote to that for me, so it was the thing that allowed me to give free rein to my imagination, because to do that as a journalist.
Ali Noorani [00:05:37] And that to me was very interesting because I love writing. I’m a terrible writer, but still I loved doing it right. It’s kind of like I love cooking, but I’m a terrible cook. But if you don’t mind, give me a little sense of kind of what’s it like to kind of write the facts around science, but then to be able to take a step back and to to tell a story or are they very related?
Laura Spinney [00:05:57] I think they are related, although I’ve always kept them apart. I mean, I’ve definitely, I think, got better at telling stories with the science because I’ve written fiction and the science, because science is so extraordinary and so eternally surprising and astonishing, has fed into my fiction. So I’ve basically failed completely at keeping the two separate, I think. And yet I still have this feeling that they kind of reside in two different compartments in my brain, that I’m obviously deluding myself. But, you know, I, for example, never had the intention of writing this book about the 1918 flu. In fact, at that point, although I’ve been a science in this for quite a few years, I have never really written about infectious diseases. And what happened was that I was sent to the Italian Alps. I was living in Switzerland at the time, and I’m a freelancer and many of the editors I write for were beginning to think about how to mark the centenary of the Great War, the First World War. This is round 2013. So we came up with all these crazy ideas and there was some interesting work going on in battlefield archeology. And the reason I wound up in the Italian Alps was because there were archeologists of ice who up there in the very high altitudes sort of pulling out the remains of battles that were fought up there between the Austrians and the Italians for what’s known as the third front. It’s not really very well known part of the war. So I went up there because, you know, these battlefields are sort of melting out wholesale now that the glaciers are melting and ice is a great preserve. So some extraordinary finds were coming out, including the remains of young soldiers. And it was very moving for that reason. And when I came home, I said to my husband, if this is what the next few years of commemorating the Great War is going to be like for me, I’m not sure I can take it’s too emotional. You know, I had attended what was probably the last funeral of a soldier from the First World War, and my husband thought for a minute and he said, you know, we never talk about the so-called Spanish flu, but I think it killed many more people. So I did a simple Google search and I was just blown away by the numbers and the fact that we weren’t talking about marking that centenary. And that was basically the start of that adventure and the kind of the inspiration for that. It’s all my husband’s fault.
Ali Noorani [00:08:14] We’ll get him on the line next week. So the book is Pale Rider: the Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World and I’m probably like, who knows how many people out there who suddenly from the last year said: hey I want to read this book. But as I went through it, you tell the story of this flu and how it moves across the country. And since we’re here to talk about immigration, I wanted to kind of hone in on, if you don’t mind, the stories in New York of Antonio, Stella and then Royalle Copeland, who were so pivotal in terms of engaging the immigrant communities of New York City in preventing the flu from spreading.
Laura Spinney [00:08:52] Absolutely. Because, of course, that was a point in history when New York was seeing some of the largest numbers, influx of immigrants ever in its history. It was in one of its great big surges and partly because of sheer numbers, but partly because nobody thought about it or planned for it. These people generally found their way into terrible accommodation, terrible jobs. They often didn’t speak English and they were very far away from anything resembling health care, good health care. And I think this is fairly obvious to those who worked, who saw them every day, people like the naturalized Italian doctor, Antonio Stella, and to a lesser extent, Royal Copeland, who was the health commissioner for the city from the spring of 1918. But I think what they realized, both of them in different ways through their experience, was that those immigrants became sick in America. Number one, they didn’t bring that sickness with them. And that whichever way you cut it, whatever your politics, this is not good for society as a whole. It wasn’t good for those people and it wasn’t good for the so-called natives, indigenous people of New York. And therefore, it was a problem that everybody needed to think about.
Ali Noorani [00:10:06] So then in the last year, as the world has struggled with covid-19, what are the parallels that you saw between the flu of 1918 and the flu of 2020 or covid-19 in particularly the impact on on immigrant communities?
Laura Spinney [00:10:24] Yeah so I mean, I think it’s been said it had been said before this pandemic, but it’s an idea that is now uppermost in a lot of people’s minds since sort of covid-19 declared itself, which is that a pandemic is really- it holds up a mirror to the society. Our society is at a more unequal point than it has been for half a century, since historians will tell you this sort of social contract started to break down. And there’s even a theory among historians. It’s controversial, I’ll admit, but the pandemics don’t happen at random times. They happen at times when societies are very unequal and therefore vulnerable to an external threat. So that’s one of the things that 2020 has in common with 1918, which was a point in time when societies were also very unequal and you saw those tensions. They manifested themselves in the war, among other things. So that’s one thing. But also, of course, they are their respiratory diseases. They emerge. They’re incredibly contagious and relatively lethal because they’re respiratory. They travel across the world very fast because humanity hasn’t seen them before. They encounter a population that has very little or zero immunity. They seem to strike in waves. Why that happens is not entirely clear, though. We’re beginning to understand that it has to do with mutation and new variants that emerge that are more transmissible and therefore more lethal just by being more transmissible, as well as perhaps also being more lethal in themselves and may fall upon populations that are at the beginning know nothing about those diseases, although this is where 1918 and 2020 part ways, because the level of ignorance, even among the scientific community at that time meant that they never really solved the problem before the pandemic receded, whereas we have done something spectacularly different as demonstrated by the development of the vaccines within a year of the pandemic, declaring itself.
Ali Noorani [00:12:19] When we look at the issues of access to information, access to vaccinations, how in the context of what what we’re dealing with now, I mean, you wrote this wonderful column. You wrote a couple of columns of note in The Guardian, talking about policies in the US, but then also kind of the history of misinformation or hesitancy, if you will, when communities are kind of presented with vaccines.
Laura Spinney [00:12:42] I thought of another point and answer to your previous question, which I ought to just make, which is that, you know, people often ask me about the parallels between the two pandemics. And there is one really, really, really important difference, which is that we think that 1918 killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million people. And we we recently passed four million here. So they’re not in the same league. And I do not think, I very much hope, but I think it most unlikely that we’ll ever get anywhere near the Spanish flu this time around, especially given we now have vaccine. So that’s an important difference to bear in mind. Fake news has always been an issue, always a rumor, and the fear that drives it and xenophobia have always been issues of pandemics. I think if there’s something different this time, it’s that both the information and the misinformation go that much faster because of the Internet and travel and volumes are just unprecedented, but that’s true for the information and the disinformation, and I think we’re going to have to wait a while before we see how it all comes out in the wash, which wins, so to speak. I think at this particular point in the pandemic, when the vaccines are being rolled out, we are seeing the price we pay for fake news, for misinformation. You know, I think there are some valid reasons for vaccine hesitancy, which is what I was trying to get at in that article in The Guardian about the history of it, because it’s as old as vaccines themselves. And there are, if you like, more valid reasons in certain sectors of society than in others, because the history of vaccination is violent. There are stories there have been cases of people from ethnic minorities in the United States, for example, being vaccinated gun some point or experimental treatments, including vaccines being tested on ethnic minorities and the mentally, as they might have been killed and deffective, against their will or without their consent, even if they were able to get it. So it does have a violent past. And I think one of the interesting things about this being the first so to speak, digitally witnessed, serious pandemic, is that all that information is available at the top of a finger. You can find out about that history. And so it may be shaping responses this time more than it has perhaps in previous pandemics. But of course, there is also a lot of fake news. And there are individuals out there who capitalize on people’s fear and on people’s desire for information and perhaps because of their fear, gullibility sometimes to feed the doubts, really just to ask questions. And because if you think about it, to make somebody go and get a vaccination, to go get a vaccine, you have to make them take an action is much easier to prevent people taking in action. And that’s all the antivaxers, as I call them, for those kind of people at the extreme of the spectrum. That’s all they have to do and social media is they’re willing tool. So I think we’re seeing the effects of that now. We’re seeing it, for example, in the fact that people from groups are apparently less willing to come forward for vaccines. I think in the mix, there is some real understanding of history, some real and some sort of grounded suspicion, some fears of a new vaccine technology, even though more and more evidence is indicating that it’s safe and effective. And rumor and fake news.
Ali Noorani [00:16:00] You know, I was on a call last week with some friends and colleagues. There’s a woman who does work with communities of color, as we were talking about this, the way she put it, that was so wonderful. She said there’s there’s a wisdom in the hesitance. And if you don’t empathize with it and you just kind of say, do it, people will just kind of recede and almost retrench, but I just not the kind of the wisdom of the hesitance kind of acknowledges it, but then kind of provides the the path for somebody to say, OK, I’ve learned some more about this. Now I can trust to take that step.
Laura Spinney [00:16:31] The thing is what I’ve learned from asking, from talking to the experts about vaccine hesitancy is that it’s so diverse. I think you need to separate out these individuals. I was talking about who I think have genuinely bad and manipulate those fears for their own agenda. Once you’ve separated them out, then what’s left is a mass of people with doubts, maybe just questions. And in every case, almost their doubts and questions stem from a different source. The questions are different. And if you don’t engage with them as individuals and ask what it is that’s troubling them, what they want to know, what information they would need to make a decision, then you are missing a step. You’re showing a lack of wisdom, I think. And I think the scientists and the medics are understanding that there’s been a debate about what’s the best way to tackle it, because public health experts for ages have been telling us, just look at the numbers. The vaccination works at a population level. There’s no doubt about it. But the trouble is that people don’t think about themselves at a population level. They think about themselves as individuals. And as with any medical intervention, there is a risk and there will be probably a small number of vaccine injuries. The number will be small. That’s why we do clinical testing. That’s why that all has to happen before approval happens. But there will inevitably be a small number of injuries and those people need to be compensated, need to be reassured. The people who haven’t yet been injured need to be reassured that they won’t be among them, that they will be compensated if they are. And I think that’s why people talk about using stories as well instead of statistics. So you’re afraid that that somebody, you know, suffered an allergic reaction to the vaccine? Well, let me tell you about another couple of people who I met last week, your age, your background, who had the vaccine and had no adverse effects whatsoever. And, you know, some people. That approach, they say, is patronizing, condescending, but in fact, it’s the approach of of the extremely powerful antivax movements that are sort of rallying and coordinating online. They use stories. They put up stories of individuals and they ask questions. And that’s what they do. They stay away from the statistics which show how powerfully beneficial vaccination has been for humanity over history.
Ali Noorani [00:18:59] The data is not on their side, but the outlier story is very compelling. So this morning in the I think it was a F.P., they reported that the British government was being very clear that, you know, as they put it there, individuals can get a jab or a shot of vaccine regardless of immigration status and in the UK, I think the article cited the approximately 1.3 Million undocumented immigrants. So it seems like that’s a very clear and forthright message of, OK, regardless of immigration status, you can get a vaccine in the US. It feels more muddled. And as you wrote about it in The Guardian, it’s not just muddled in terms of message, but all of these kind of underlying policy questions that came up with the Trump administration. So I wanted to ask you to kind of unpack what you’re seeing, not just in the US, but you have a vantage point on what’s happening in the rest of the world as well.
Laura Spinney [00:19:53] Yeah, because, I mean, it’s certainly not just the US that has made things difficult for immigrants in terms of public health. The thing to understand is that immigrants, whether they are legal or illegal, and that categorization depends on what country you’re talking about, if it exists. Is it that they are in general, they have less access to health care for all sorts of complicated reasons. So they start off as a disadvantage and then governments can make it. They can do nothing, in which case is that sort of preexisting disadvantage or they can make it more difficult that they have in the US with the reinterpretation of the public charge with the during the Trump administration or in the UK, which is hardened up in the same way over the last couple of decades and done some quite hostile things like they have that there is sharing of data between the Home Office and the GPs. Is it supposed to be happening less and less but it still happens. So of course, people are afraid to come forward. I had a very interesting conversation with a Norwegian demographer. Norway has a very well funded public health system. There is no active discrimination against immigrants in that country, and yet they’re less likely to get vaccinated, they have less good access. That, as I said, complex reasons sometimes to do language, sometimes to do with the historical reasons we discussed, sometimes just inability to find the time because of work obligations and so on, distance from clinics, et cetera. And his argument was this sort of package of blockages, of obstacles to get to getting access to the health care they need, including vaccines, is if you follow that argument to its end, then you should be prioritizing, which you need to counteract that disadvantage rather than just not do anything or obviously put obstacles in that path. And I thought that was very interesting. And he had actually put that argument to the health authorities in Norway saying, you know, they should be prioritized because they are immigrants, these certain groups of immigrants. And the one of the responses of the authorities who are reluctant to do that was that it would counter intuitively stigmatize those groups in the eyes of supposedly indigenous Norwegians. So, you know, I think it is complicated, but one of the things a pandemic shows is that whatever your politics and of course, it is impossible to remove politics from all of this, even if you take the harshest, most libertarian stance, it is not in anybody’s interests to make it difficult for immigrants to either declare an infectious disease or get protected from it, tested for it or protected from it by a vaccine. Because take the US economy, it would not work without immigrants. So it would just fall apart they’re there, viruses is travel with humans, they travel across borders, whether you like it or not. And this is a fact that you need to recognize if you want your society as a whole to be healthy. And that’s, as I say, to take the harsh libertarian approach, not even to think about the moral reasons for everybody having equal access to health care.
Ali Noorani [00:23:08] Right. And going back the book: Pale Rider. One of the questions in my head was the 1918 to six years later that Congress passes one of the most, kind of the foundational immigration law to really restrict immigration to the US. And I’ve always kind of wondered, was there a kind of after or a consequence of the flu, kind of the way that was seen as this global pandemic in the political debate within the US that led to, maybe not directly but indirectly, this massive restriction of immigration? One of the reasons why we’re so worried about just access to the vaccine and always trying to emphasize the role of the immigrant community in responding to covid-19 is to try to avoid kind of a deepening of an anti-immigrant narrative because of a global pandemic, but do you see signs of that that we should be worried about?
Laura Spinney [00:24:06] I did not conduct national survey of the US in 1918. I, I zoomed in on Pocket’s notably New York City and Alaska to try and get a contrast between very different communities. And one of the things I learned is that things can differ extraordinarily, even within a country between cities, between communities. So I would hesitate to generalize, but I think the really interesting thing that happened in New York in 1918 was that, you know, this is a time when infectious disease is still the main killer of humanity. And there have been many outbreaks of lethal diseases in the previous century in that city. Somebody always got blamed for it. Usually the most recent immigrant group, the most visible raggedy newcomers coming through Ellis Island. And at that time in 1918, it was the Italians. And I think that there may have been an inclination to want to blame them, but for two things. First of all, the Italians were very visibly fighting for the US or a US ally, Italy, in the war. And secondly, it was fairly obvious that they were dying in the highest numbers from this flu. So it’s really interesting in a way, the xenophobia which does sort of emerge like clockwork and pandemics was somehow suppressed because it became obvious that the people in the worst conditions and with the least going for them in many ways, money, they didn’t speak English, they had a sort of natural fear of medic’s that they brought from the old country. They suffered badly as a result.
Ali Noorani [00:25:47] And it’s interesting now that you have so many, what is it, 70 percent of the food sector is immigrants. Almost 40 percent of 30, 30 to 40 percent of the health care sector are foreign born. So there are some inklings of the same story to be told. And, you know, we’ve seen polling that we’ve done and we’ve done research that are showing that. But it feels like if we’re not diligent about it, then the narrative will swing back on us pretty quickly.
Laura Spinney [00:26:11] Well, you know, I love to know the results of your research because I think this is fascinating and it’s what’s happening, unfolding before our eyes right now. So in the prioritization of the vaccine rollout in the United States, food workers are pretty high up there. I think certainly of transport workers, workers in the agricultural sector. And as you say, they are heavily people by immigrants who have all these things that we’ve already discussed going on higher levels of the vaccine hesitancy. Perhaps, some of them should not be working in their sectors, but they’re going to have to show proof that they are in those sectors to get the priority status for the vaccine. So this could potentially be a problem. I don’t know how the various forces will balance each other out, and that’s why your research will come in handy. But it could backfire for their communities, but also for the national rollout and this idea of getting closer to something resembling herd immunity, which would in theory, let us get back to some kind of normality and open up the economy. I’m not just talking about the US. This is true everywhere. But if the people that you’re prioritizing, because then the people who fundamentally make the economy work don’t want to come forward, obviously you have a problem.
Ali Noorani [00:27:26] So exactly. It was, I think a few weeks ago, the governor of Nebraska, which has a large meatpacking industry, was talking about the rollout of the vaccine, particularly among agricultural frontline workers, such as those in the meatpacking industry. And a reporter asked, well, what if the person is undocumented? And the governor said, well, there are no undocumented workers and meatpacking industry, which is not true. Number one, I would imagine it’s probably not. He realizes it’s not true, but you can kind of see the look on his face of I don’t want to make this an issue about immigration. On the other hand, he was not clear and saying everybody should have access regardless of immigration status, if they’re in this industry. And I just felt like it was politically it was risky, but from a health perspective, he missed a really, really important opportunity.
Laura Spinney [00:28:12] Of course, and his problem is that he’s just a small cog in the wheel of this huge machine that places immigrants in where they are with respect to health care, which is which is complicated and involves the public charge rule, which discourages them from coming forward for health care because it could potentially jeopardize their chances of getting a green card. Well, this is incredibly complicated from state to state, very difficult to get your head around. And I think there’s a lot of misinformation there just because it’s not clear what the rules are in each place, difficult for a lawyer to understand let alone anybody else. So I think he’s trying. He obviously realizes he’s standing on the kind of precipice of this whole can of worms, maybe he’s trying to be fair in his particular context, but the trouble is it’s all linked and you need to kind of cohesive policy to deal with the fact that viruses travel with people. And if you make some people in your society invisible, you’ve got a problem. And that’s why we come back to this idea of a pandemic holding up a mirror to society, because it’s the whole society that the virus attacks and it goes for its weak points. And we see that again and again. And that’s why immigration has been such a major issue. And race and inequalities in general in this pandemic, in every pandemic.
Ali Noorani [00:29:39] I have approximately four hundred and twenty two more questions for you. We’ll get to them.
Laura Spinney [00:29:44] Can I just tell you about a study. A study that came out of England in 2012 based on the 2009 flu pandemic, which was the sort of anticlimactic one, because that kills around 600,000 people, if I remember correctly, that that is around the same as as a seasonal flu each year. So it was technically a pandemic because it spread across several continents, but it wasn’t the pandemic on the scale of others we’ve seen, anyway. That pandemic affected England and somebody did a study on it, and they showed that death rates in the poorest fifth of the population from that flu were three times as high as death rates in the richest fifth of the population. So, I mean, you talk about a mirror. It’s it’s everywhere. It’s very clear that the virus just exploits weaknesses and inequalities.
Ali Noorani [00:30:37] So there are things that you are seeing that you’re studying, that you’re maybe writing on that are giving you hope for the future?
Laura Spinney [00:30:48] I mean, the trouble with us is that we forget each time and then we panic when a new one comes along and we seem to have to learn the same lessons over and over again. But I think we do learn those lessons even if slowly we learn lessons from Ebola. If you look at the very much better responses of the Asian countries to this germ than in Europe and America, for example, a lot of it can be put down to that recent memory of SARS and the protocols they had to put in place to control that and the fear that that left with them, the memories they still have of how frightening that was. And likewise, the world learned from Ebola. I think the world learned some lessons from AIDS. I hope so. If you think about the first vaccine rollout that we’ve seen in this past year, that owes something to the response to Ebola in trying to get vaccines out that quickly, it wasn’t ideal, but we learned from that. And I think you’re seeing the fruits of that now. All this vaccine nationalism is incredibly unhelpful for all sorts of reasons of patchy rollout, even for scientific reasons, is not something we want because it puts all kinds of selective pressures on the on the virus. And we could see more virus escape of the kind we’ve seen already so far. The vaccine nationalism is bad on every level, including, of course, the moral one. But for example, here in Europe, there now moves afoot because Europe has realized that since health is a member state issue, there is a need for a some kind of complementary mechanism which coordinates the various European powers when it comes to emergency like this in terms of acquiring essential drugs and equipment. So that’s happening now. Again, of course, too late for this pandemic, but perhaps not too late for the next one. And I think we do have short memories as human populations, but somehow we also muddle through and we learn in the long run. I mean, we’ve done much better this time, I think, than in 1918.
Ali Noorani [00:32:48] Well, every one hundred years, a little bit of progress we’ve got.
Laura Spinney [00:32:54] I know. It’s not great in terms of optimism, is it? I’ll see if I can do better.
Ali Noorani [00:33:00] So my last question, and this is always a funny question to somebody who is not in the States, but it’s the name of the podcast, so I ask everybody. The name of the podcast is Only in America, so the question that I ask everyone is just to finish this sentence: Only in America…
Laura Spinney [00:33:19] Well, I learned of the concept, which was absolutely novel to me the other day at the concierge doctor. Do you know what this is?
Ali Noorani [00:33:27] No, no.
Laura Spinney [00:33:28] Well, maybe it exists elsewhere, but I’ve never come across it. This is a doctor who basically you pay, I think, by the hour, kind of steeply, and he or she will get you what you want in terms of medical services. And these people, from what I hear from my contacts in the US, are amongst the worst behaved in terms of demanding vaccine for their wealthy clients and trying to jump the queue. So this has been a bit of an eye-opener to me, and of course, if you talk about inequality in health care, that is kind of an extreme, and I guess you’d have to say only in America.
Ali Noorani [00:34:10] Well, you know. What can I say? We’re so proud.
Laura Spinney [00:34:15] Part of the American dream.
Ali Noorani [00:34:19] Thank you so, so much, Laura. I really appreciate your time. Really appreciate everything that you’ve been writing, in particular respect to access for the immigrant community to vaccine and information. So thank you so much.
Laura Spinney [00:34:32] Thank you it was a great conversation. Keep up the good work.
Laura Spinney [00:34:45] Laura Spinney is an author and science journalist. Her latest book is Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World. You can learn more about Laura at our website: ImmigrationForum.org/podcast. And if you like what you hear, subscribe to Only in America, wherever you are listening to this episode. Stay tuned for next week’s episode, where we’re going to continue our discussion on public health and vaccine access in immigrant communities. Only in America is produced and edited by Joanna Taylor and Becka Wall with a pinch hit thank you to Mark MacDonald. Our artwork and graphics are designed by Karla Leyja. I’m Ali Noorani and I will talk to you next week.