Equity?

 To Sci. Am.

Dear Editor

“When there is health equity, every person has a fair and just opportunity to attain their full health potential, regardless of social position or socially determined circumstances.” So tells us Sci.Am's sponsored article on health equity (June 2022).

The article is understandably biased in favour of the pharmaceutical company Takeda,

but Scientific American, in choosing to publish the article, also unavoidably shares in this bias. 

No one can reasonably quarrel with the premise that everyone deserves a just and fair opportunity to be cared for. When, however, we read that “when there is health equity, every person has a fair…opportunity to attain THEIR full health potential,” we become a bit suspicious. The illogical juxtaposition of “every person” and “attain their full health potential” is here not because Takeda is incapable of putting a sentence together correctly, but simply because it wants to be “woke”—that is, because it does not want to offend those who do not like the presumed sexism that the same sentence, written with logical correctness as “…every person has  a …opportunity to attain HIS (or, if the situation warrants it, HER) full health potential…” has. A simple change from “every person” to “all persons,” incidentally, would have rendered the construction harmless even for the most wokishly sensitive reader. But no, the wokish construction had to be retained for the sake of equity: “everyone has…his” is too traditional, too paternalistic. “Everyone has…their” is so much more equitable.

OK, no great harm done. What is worrisome, though, is that this wokiness may extend to other and more significant areas of social life, like the disregard of merit in favour of equity, etc.

All this in answer to Takeda. Scientific American, though, as already indicated, is not totally exonerated: in hosting Takeda it is also, implicitly, a shareholder of Takeda’s views. 

Ermes Culos