Why can’t everyone have Princess Kate’s medical care?

News that the Princess of Wales is battling cancer has swamped the corporate media both in Britain and the United States. People are sympathetic to Catherine Middleton, a mother of three young children, as they would be for anyone fighting cancer.

That doesn’t explain the media’s obsession with the royals. The wealthy and powerful want to divert attention away from the looming economic recession and the genocide in Gaza.

The TV networks are silent about Dr. Mohammed Zaher Al-Nono’s execution by Israeli forces in Gaza on March 23. The Palestinian doctor was murdered in front of his patients at Al-Shifa hospital after refusing to leave their side.

Isn’t that as compelling a news story as a British princess, who was appointed “Dame Grand Cross of the Victorian Order,” having cancer? This noble order was named after Queen Victoria, who starved a million Irish people to death. 

Meanwhile the Zionist regime is preparing to kick 22 Palestinian cancer patients out of hospitals in Al-Quds (Jerusalem) and Tel Abib (Tel Aviv) and send them to Gaza. The group includes five newborn babies and their mothers.

Apartheid Israel has used U.S. bombs and shells to attack every hospital in Gaza. The crisis conditions in these hospitals include lacking surgical gauze because of the Zionist state’s blockade of Gaza. 

British capitalists, junior partners in Big Oil, also have bloody hands. British and U.S. warplanes are bombing Yemen.

Both British Petroleum and Shell are headquartered in London. Israel exists to guarantee Big Oil’s profits looted from western Asia.

None of the stories about Princess Kate mention the savage cuts by the Tories (Conservative Party) to Britain’s National Health Service. Around 8 million patients are on waiting lists for treatment. 

Don’t these patients, who overwhelmingly come from the working class, deserve the same care that Princess Kate is assured of?

‘Shocking and inhuman’ inequality

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared that “of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.”

It was shocking and inhuman that 12-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a tooth abscess in 2007. The Black child’s mother couldn’t afford a dentist for her son. Many dentists in private practice don’t accept Medicaid.

Neither does the Mount Sinai Health System of 30 medical clinics in New York City. Mount Sinai Hospital’s CEO Kenneth Davis raked in $6,896,381 in 2022.

Two years before, at the beginning of the COVID crisis, nurses there had to wear Hefty garbage bags because of a lack of personal protective equipment.

It didn’t help Deamonte Driver that a few miles from his Maryland home was the National Institutes of Health. Less than 40 miles away was the Johns Hopkins Hospital and medical school, which received $843 million in NIH research grants last year.

The “world famous” hospital — named after a slave master — didn’t allow any Black physicians to practice until Dr. Roland Smoot was given admitting privileges in 1966. 

Hopkins used the cells of Henrietta Lacks without her own or her family’s permission. Lacks, a Black mother of five children, died in 1951 of cervical cancer when she was only 31 years old. 

According to the STAT website, these HeLa cells “saved countless lives and sparked the creation of the entire field of virology.

“HeLa cells are also a big moneymaker. Johns Hopkins distributed them for free, but a number of biotech companies profit from products derived from the cells. Among them is Thermo Fisher, a biotech company with an annual revenue of over $40 billion.”

It would be interesting if research derived from using HeLa cells will help Princess Kate’s treatment.

The harvesting of Henrietta Lacks’ cells without her family’s knowledge was a complete lack of respect. It was no different than Black cemeteries being robbed to provide corpses for anatomy lessons in white medical schools, as described in Harriet Washington’s classic book, “Medical Apartheid.”

Slave owners would sell Black corpses to medical schools.

Health care is a human right in socialist Cuba where working people are respected. While Gaza has been besieged, Cuba has suffered from a 64-year-long economic blockade by the U.S. government.

Hospitals are short of supplies. But Cuba, like Palestine, refuses to surrender.