Abstract
Many health workers in the Americas, especially women, have been victims of discrimination and different types of grievances during the COVID-19 pandemic. These brief reflections aim to make the problem visible, offer theoretical explanations and some recommendations. The pandemic constitutes a massive crisis that triggers fears and reassuring of diffuse anxieties, which often includes someone to blame. Healthcare workers have become circumstantial scapegoating targets. The inflicted attacks can be understood as reactive hate crimes since they are originated from an allegedly healthy person to an allegedly contaminated person. People seems to incur in a sanitary profiling process based on the health worker's uniform. However, these expressions of hatred are fueled by pre-pandemic circumstances such as the precariousness of health systems and deficient medical equipment, misogyny, or the pervasiveness of authoritarian tendencies. Understanding this situation as a human rights issue, it is suggested to consider measures in order to discourage these attacks, such as: guaranteeing the appropriate conditions of hospitals and the personal protective equipment of workers; development of recognition campaigns of the healthcare staff and the work they carry out (in particular female nurses); and implementing transitory regulations that sanction any hate crime type attack to health workers or the scientific community. Furthermore, educational advocacy efforts should reiterate basic hygiene measures for the people, but also focus on refuting false and pseudoscientific beliefs that contribute to the fear-induced construction of the health worker as a threat of contagion.
Highlights
Many health workers in the Americas, especially women, have been victims of discrimination and different types of grievances during the COVID-19 pandemic
The aggressions targeted at health workers respond to a scapegoating logic, but constitute hate crimes, since the attacks are directed at others based on their actual or attributed group or categorical membership
The irrefutable proof of this reactive condition lies in the fact that, before the pandemic, there was not any systematic and reiterative hate attack against health workers, in different parts of the planet and following the same pattern of aggression
Summary
Many health workers in the Americas, especially women, have been victims of discrimination and different types of grievances during the COVID-19 pandemic. ORELLANA-HEALTH WORKERS AS HATE CRIMES TARGETS DURING COVID-19 labor que desempeñan (en particular las enfermeras); y el establecimiento de normativas transitorias que sancionen cualquier ataque de odio contra trabajadores sanitarios o la comunidad científica.
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