Abdul El-Sayed suggested female privilege means more funding for breast cancer than other diseases

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed suggested in a newly unearthed essay that women’s “social power and privilege” is why breast cancer research is better-funded than examination of other diseases.The 2012 diatribe against the “Pink Ribbon Lobby” was published in 2×2 Project, a journal sponsored by Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, when El-Sayed was working as a physician in training and social epidemiologist.Pink ribbons are often distributed every October as part of Breast Cancer Awareness month.“The breast cancer lobby has done an incredible job raising my ‘awareness’ of Breast Cancer—if I weren’t an epidemiologist, it would have me believing that the women around me were in imminent danger,” the future gubernatorial and Senate contender wrote in the essay, first reported by The Washington Free Beacon.“All of this is not to say that breast cancer isn’t an incredibly important disease, which it is,” he added.

“And given the gendered history of public health, medicine, and research in our country, the social focus on breast cancer is warranted.However, the reallocation of public funds disproportionately to breast cancer is certainly not.”El-Sayed continued: “We’re left with an important question—why do some diseases attract so much support anyway?”“The answer is complex, for certain.

But two possible answers could spell problems for equity in health research allocation,” he said.“First, it’s possible that those diseases with the strongest advocacy are the ones that have the highest survival.After all, those once or currently affected by a disease are most likely to advocate for funding allocation to it,” added El-Sayed, saying it was “also possible that advocacy is a function of the social power and privilege of those most likely to get a disease.”Women age 50 and older are most likely to get breast cancer, the second leading cause of cancer deaths in females, according...