This story is part of a larger project series, "Voices from the Vineyard," led by Sarah Klearman, a 2020 Impact Fellow. She is reporting on how the twin crises of the pandemic and the wildfires have impacted the health of the valley’s farmworkers and their families....
“Disasters have a way of exposing the most vulnerable among us and putting them in harm’s way,” Terence Mulligan, president of the Napa Valley Community Foundation, told me.
As the number of coronavirus cases and deaths continue to tick up around the country, an estimated 13% of people in Shelby County are facing the pandemic without health insurance.
On one side of the Byhalia pipeline battle: Fossil fuel companies' clout. Squaring off against Big Oil: Black families fighting to protect their health, homes, loved ones and land.
The proposed Byhalia Connection pipeline, a joint venture of Plains All American Pipeline and the Valero Energy Corp., set off an environmental justice movement that's picked up steam in Memphis and around the country, as Black families from southwest Memphis square off with Big Oil.
“There’s so many aspects of services that failed people that shouldn’t have,” said Marselles Coe of San Antonio, who depends on dialysis treatments.
Housing insecurity is a huge story in every community. Even before COVID-19, one in four tenants nationwide spent more than half their income on rent, 1 million were evicted a year, and about half a million people experienced homelessness. Now, in the face of massive job loss and financial distress
COVID-19 "created this enormous uncertainty vacuum,” said misinformation researcher Carl Bergstrom, and into the void flowed a sea of specious claims.
“We in primary care are exhausted.”
An analysis of cases in 50 ZIP codes in Kern by The Californian shows that rural valley communities surrounding Bakersfield — many of which are home to prisons, farmworkers and some of the county's most impoverished pockets — were hardest hit.
