COVID-19

We recognize that the COVID pandemic has caused a dual economic crisis that has put us in a position where more than 40% of jobs lost will never return to the economy, disproportionately harming women and people of color, and those living paycheck to paycheck have been thrown into a holding pattern waiting for relief to dig them out of debt caused by no fault of their own. People deserve to have security of life, and as such relief funding needs to prioritize our ability to access modern living necessities while keeping people safe. We need to do this free from private profit that will inherently keep some in a permanent state of debt from which they can never recover.

Relative to other nations, the US response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been a straightforward failure. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, millions of jobs have been lost, and businesses in every neighborhood of every city in America have shuttered and will not return. The priority at all levels of government has been to protect the profits of already successful businesses and corporations while waiting for a vaccine to allow us to “get back to normal”; workers are forced to return to unsafe in-person work in order to pay their rent and buy groceries. We do in fact need an effective vaccine rollout prioritizing where COVID has hit the hardest to keep our communities safe, not keep large corporations making record profits, and contract tracing to understand where spread is occurring.