The paper this article is based on is only a week old. It's a common problem in scientific reporting for journalists to report on brand new studies that haven't had a chance to be read by more people, or for comparisons to other studies to be made. One research paper is never enough to prove anything in the scientific community, and it's misleading to the public to make it seem that way.

It's an age old saying, but "correlation is not causation". The million things that affect disease burden/fear of disease and the million things that affect racism probably intersect, and the two probably do also directly effect each other, but the root cause? I doubt it.

The author lets his political leaning be known to the reader right out the gate by calling President Trump a racist in the first sentence. Besides inserting this unnecessary label, the author uses a new study to setup a classic case of correlation without causation. Author Tom Jacobs says "white people were more biased against black people and black people were more biased against white people, if they lived in states where diseases were more prevalent." He is asserting that the relationship is correlated, when it could be equally true, if not even more plausible to think that areas of the U.S. that are more racially or politically polarized have been unable to renew their local infrastructure, resulting in increased levels of infectious disease. My point is that it's unclear from this article and the accompanying study how correlated the two really are and presumptuous to suggest that we know.

Opinionated way to start the article followed up by research that falling into correlation w/o causation. The links to the 'research' are only linked to an abstract page and to another PSMag article (which linked to another PSMag article that showed a 404 error). There is no way to personally verify this information but its even harder to make the claim that the correlation is, in fact, causation - there are just too many factors that could play into the research. However, the research, if true, is very interesting and deserves more studies to narrow down the causes of racism.