St. Louis County Health Director Dr. Faisal Khan, a Pakistani American, was subjected to racial abuse at a St. Louis County Council meeting, according to multiple media reports. He apparently got caught up in the middle of a fierce, angry debate on new mask mandates amid surging infections attributed to the Delta variant of the COVID19 virus that originated in India. The anti-mask crowd is particularly strong in Republican states that voted for former President Donald J. Trump.
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| Dr. Faisal Khan |
Dr. Khan was subjected to racial slurs and physically assaulted after defending a new mask mandate to combat COVID-19. In response to the abuse, he raised his middle finger at a crowd gathered at a St. Louis County Council meeting, according to a Wednesday letter obtained by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “After being physically assaulted, called racial slurs and surrounded by an angry mob, I expressed my displeasure by using my middle finger toward an individual who had physically threatened me and called me racist slurs,” Khan wrote to Councilwoman Rita Heard Days who led the meeting.
“You asked us to stay home,” Rita Heard Days, the council chairwoman, told the director of the county’s public health department before voting to lift the mask mandate. “You asked us to put on masks. You asked us to stay six feet apart,” she said. “We have followed your orders, and yet we are still in a predicament. So something is not working.” In an apparent reference to the rapid spread of the highly transmissible delta variant in the United States, Dr. Faisal Khan told her that the virus has changed.
While testifying, Dr. Khan said members of the crowd mocked his accent. As he left, Khan said he was shoulder-bumped, then surrounded by a crowd and called a racial slur. He also called out Councilman Tim Fitch for what Khan described as a xenophobic dog-whistle in asking Khan about his credentials. “Dr. Khan, we certainly have heard of your background before, but most here have not,” Fitch said during the meeting. “Can you tell us why you’re called Dr. Khan? Are you a physician in the United States?”
Dr. Saud Anwar, a Connecticut pulmonologist and state senator, came up with a ventilator splitter to deal with the shortages of life-saving equipment. Dr. Gul Zaidi, an acute-care pulmonologist in Long Island, was featured in a CBS 60 Minutes segment on how the doctors are dealing with unprecedented demands to save lives. Dr. Umair Shah was interviewed about his work by ABC TV affiliate in Houston, Texas.
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As of 2016, there were 12,454 Pakistani doctors and 45,830 Indian doctors out of 215,630 total in the United States.
ReplyDeletehttps://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=68336
India 45,830
Pakistan 12,454
Grenada 10,789
Philipines 10,217
Dominica 9,974
Mexico 9,923
Canada 7,765
Dominican Republic 6,269
China 5,772
UAE 4,635
Egypt 4,379
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Total Foreign Doctors in UK 66,211
India 18,953
Pakistan 8,026
Nigeria 4,880
Egypt 4,471
Foreign Doctors in Canada 25,400:
South Africa 2,604
India 2,127
Ireland 1,942
UK 1,923
US 1,263
Pakistan 1,087