In a press conference following the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Veterans Affairs ICU nurse, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey presented a reasonably provocative question that I have posed numerous times at various junctures over my 50-year lifespan as a Black man and career as a social scientist: “How many more Americans need to die?”
I remember asking this same question when police officers shot and killed Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Sonya Massey and so many other unarmed Black people. I wondered the same thing when George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old Black boy. Minnesota governor Tim Walz declared in a press conference this week that Pretti’s shooting is an “inflection point” for our nation.
As protests erupted around the world in summer 2020, many people thought that Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd also was an inflection point in long-standing demands for police accountability and reform. To date, Congress still has not passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which former California congresswoman Karen Bass introduced in 2021.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I remember watching the daily death toll trackers. I kept asking myself and others, “How many more Americans need to die?” Meanwhile, the U.S. president was proposing unscientific remedies. “So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” Donald Trump said in an April 2020 White House briefing. “I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?”
As it turns out, ultraviolet light cleansings and bleach-infused cocktails did not reduce infections and deaths in the U.S. In fact, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center, more than 1.1 million people across our nation died from COVID-related illnesses, the highest of any country in the world. Brazil was a distant second with 699,276 fatalities. Did that many Americans have to die?
I often teach, write and speak about racialized health disparities. Like COVID, most other diseases disproportionately kill Black Americans. As I regularly review statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal data sources, I repeatedly ask how many more of my people need to die before elected officials, taxpayer-supported public health agencies, doctors and health-care professionals, philanthropic foundations, and other entities aggressively dismantle the deeply researched systemic forces that cyclically place Black people at highest risk of preventable deaths.
The maternal mortality crisis is one example that I frequently highlight. For years, CDC data have shown that Black women die in childbirth at exponentially higher rates than do white women. Specifically, the death rate is consistently more than three times higher for Black women. In 2023, the federal agency reported that in comparison to the previous year, death rates worsened for Black expectant mothers, while they improved for white women.
Here is my prediction: Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions more Americans will senselessly die during this era of underappreciation for scientific evidence and facts, race-neutral policymaking, politicized or nonexistent investigations, and insufficient efforts to hold elected officials accountable for governmental negligence and fatal acts of violence.
Last year, the Trump administration canceled an unprecedented number of research grants spanning a range of topics. They also stopped investing in long-standing federally funded data-collection activities and programs that focused on diversity, equity and inclusion. Many federal agency websites were scrubbed of charts, tables and statistics that showed racial disparities between Americans on health outcomes and other metrics. Inevitably, cuts to scientific inquiry into the causes and cures of racial inequities in cancer diagnoses will exacerbate gaps in who lives and who dies from cancers. The same is most certainly true of other diseases.
Discarding decades of evidence from vaccine researchers will increase the spread of deadly diseases. Refusing to take climate science seriously will result in more severe climate disasters that kill people in the U.S. and across the planet. Federal cuts to HIV research and prevention will likely reverse decades of progress—more people will die from AIDS-related illnesses. Dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development will surely affect lifesaving care delivered around the world. All these executive actions, policy choices and funding reductions occurred during the first year of Trump’s second presidency.
Nonpartisan pursuits of scientific knowledge in university labs and other trustworthy spaces like the CDC are irrefutably important—but so too are rigorous, credible investigations into catastrophes that result in mortalities. Within hours of Pretti’s and Renee Good’s killings in Minneapolis, Trump, Vice President JD Vance, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and other federal officials blamed the slain Americans for their fatalities. Their abrupt conclusions were not based on investigations. It is plausible that the lack of such inquiries will empower immigration agents and other law enforcement officers to unnecessarily kill more people. Knowing that the White House will defend their actions, no matter what, will compel more, not fewer of them to engage in acts of violence that result in fatalities.
Uncontaminated facts about mortality are essential. Without them, more people will die and there will be less accountability for preventable losses of life. Good and Pretti did not have to die. The unarmed Black people whom police officers have killed did not have to die. Likewise, neither the more than 1.1 million Americans with COVID infections nor the countless people of color whom other racialized health inequities killed had to die. Tragically, there will be numerous others.