Mixed Race Studies

Is there evidence for the racialization of pharmaceutical regulation? Systematic comparison of new drugs approved over five years in the USA and the EU

Social Science & Medicine
Volume 280, July 2021, 114049
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114049

Shai Mulinari, Senior Lecturer
Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences
Lund University, Sweden

Andreas Vilhelmsson, Associate Researcher
Division of Social Medicine and Global Health, Department of Clinical Sciences Malmö
Lund University, Malmö, Sweden

Piotr Ozieranski, Senior Lecturer
Department of Social and Policy Sciences
University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom

Anna Bredström, Senior Lecturer, Docent; Associate Professor of Ethnicity and Migration
Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO)
Linköping University, Sweden

Highlights

• We compare race/ethnicity labeling of hundreds of new drugs in the USA and the EU.
• Many labels report race/ethnicity demographics of trials, more often in the USA.
• Fewer labels report race/ethnicity differences in response, more often in the EU.
• Racial/ethnic taxonomy used in labels is variable and inconsistent.
• The racialization of pharmaceutical regulation differs between the USA and the EU.

Recent decades have seen much interest in racial and ethnic differences in drug response. The most emblematic example is the heart drug BiDil, approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2005 for “self-identified blacks.” Previous social science research has explored this “racialization of pharmaceutical regulation” in the USA, and discussed its implications for the “pharmaceuticalization of race” in terms of reinforcing certain taxonomic schemes and conceptualizations. Yet, little is known about the racialization of pharmaceutical regulation in the USA after BiDil, and how it compares with the situation in the EU, where political and regulatory commitment to race and ethnicity in pharmaceutical medicine is weak. We have addressed these gaps by investigating 397 product labels of all novel drugs approved in the USA (n = 213) and the EU (n = 184) between 2014 and 2018. Our analysis considered statements in labeling and the racial/ethnic categories used. Overall, it revealed that many labels report race/ethnicity demographics and subgroup analyses, but that there are important differences between the USA and the EU. Significantly more US labels specified race/ethnicity demographics, as expected given the USA’s greater commitment to race and ethnicity in pharmaceutical medicine. Moreover, we found evidence that reporting of race/ethnicity demographics in EU labels was driven, in part, by statements in US labels, suggesting the spillover of US regulatory standards to the EU. Unexpectedly, significantly more EU labels reported differences in drug response, although no drug was restricted to a racial/ethnic population in a manner similar to BiDil. Our analysis also noted variability and inconsistency in the racial/ethnic taxonomy used in labels. We discuss implications for the racialization of pharmaceutical regulation and the pharmaceuticalization of race in the USA and EU.

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

Boris Johnson’s Essay on Obama and Churchill Touches Nerve Online

The New York Times
2016-04-22

Sewell Chan, International News Editor

LONDON — Hours after President Obama landed in London to urge Britons to vote to remain in the European Union, Mayor Boris Johnson, arguably the most visible leader of the campaign for Britain to leave the bloc, hit back with an opinion essay that criticized the president but immediately raised hackles online.

The essay, published in the right-leaning tabloid The Sun on Friday morning, recycled a story about a bust of Winston Churchill that was removed from the Oval Office shortly after Mr. Obama took office in 2009. It also mentioned a theory, prominent among some right-wing Americans, that Mr. Obama is motivated by a radical anti-imperialist agenda and that “the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire” motivated the removal of the bust…

Read the entire article here.

European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe

University of Minnesota Press
2011
304 pages
6 b&w photos
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN 978-0-8166-7016-1
Cloth ISBN 978-0-8166-7015-4

Fatima El-Tayeb, Professor of African-American Literature and Culture
University of California, San Diego

European Others offers an interrogation into the position of racialized communities in the European Union, arguing that the tension between a growing nonwhite, non-Christian population and insistent essentialist definitions of Europeanness produces new forms of identity and activism. Moving beyond disciplinary and national limits, Fatima El-Tayeb explores structures of resistance, tracing a Europeanization from below in which migrant and minority communities challenge the ideology of racelessness that places them firmly outside the community of citizens.

Using a notable variety of sources, from drag performances to feminist Muslim activism and Euro hip-hop, El-Tayeb draws on the largely ignored archive of vernacular culture central to resistance by minority youths to the exclusionary nationalism that casts them as threatening outcasts. At the same time, she reveals the continued effect of Europe’s suppressed colonial history on the representation of Muslim minorities as the illiberal Other of progressive Europe.

Presenting a sharp analysis of the challenges facing a united Europe seen by many as a model for twenty-first-century postnational societies, El-Tayeb combines theoretical influences from both sides of the Atlantic to lay bare how Europeans of color are integral to the continent’s past, present, and, inevitably, its future.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Theorizing Urban Minority Communities in Postnational Europe
• 1. “Stranger in My Own Country”: European Identities, Migration, and Diasporic Soundscapes
• 2. Dimensions of Diaspora: Women of Color Feminism, Black Europe, and Queer Memory Discourses
• 3. Secular Submissions: Muslim Europeans, Female Bodies, and Performative Politics
• 4. “Because It Is Our Stepfatherland”: Queering European Public Spaces
• Conclusion: “An Infinite and Undefinable Movement”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index