I work in public health, but the longer I stay in the field the more worried I become that legitimate risks are being glossed over because they don't fit our current "popular culture" themes.

It's been shown on a global scale, with only a few exceptions, that more men are dying or being taken into intensive care as a result of COVID-19: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19741-6

What prompted this post was my recent reading of a book by a researcher I genuinely admire, one of my main inspirations to go into public health, named Clare Bambra. I've followed her work for years, and picked up a new volume she coauthored on COVID-19, called "The Unequal Pandemic".

The book rightly points out the huge amount of data out there on how infectious disease takes a larger toll on people the further down the socioeconomic scale you go. A few passages mention gender-based differences, concerns around increased burdens of care and domestic violence, but I was heartbroken to find nothing about the observable differences in deaths and intensive care admissions for men.

It's not just an omission of some biological quirk of men we just haven't firmly established yet -- by choosing to omit this (and it was a choice; good work on this has already been published in scientific journals), the authors have also missed the opportunity to reflect on how the male sex might be interacting with class and race to produce this devastating disparity.

What hurts is that I honestly can't think of a reason not to include this other than that it's not currently fashionable. It's a valid and extreme form of inequality (three to one), the biological explanations are unproven and almost always have a social component. It didn't need a chapter, or even a paragraph, what disturbs me is that it is not mentioned at all.

It's hard to think of fair parallels, but imagine someone choosing to write about the social dimensions of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, but who didn't mention sexuality or race.

The part that most worries me is that I have no outlet for this other than a rather niche Reddit community. Just know that there are people like me working in the field. I've noticed. Once I've calmed down, I'll consider writing to the author with an honest inquiry. I don't expect this to make me any friends in an increasingly competitive field.