Former LGBTQ+ government adviser Catherine Meads has warned that analysis of the impact of Covid-19 on queer people has “not been done” by authorities, telling The Independent that the LGBTQ+ community has “been forgotten about”. Meads, who is a professor of health at Anglia Ruskin University, said it is “difficult” to assess the impact of the pandemic on LGBTQ+ people due to the lack of data.
Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch said the government has not found “that LGBTQ+ groups specifically have been disproportionately affected”, Meads said Badenoch was “conflating no problem with no data”, adding: “The analysis has not been done and it should have been done.” She also pointed out that this is too common a problem for the LGBTQ+ community, where “people have assumed all sorts of things to do with the health of the LGBTQ+ population without checking the data out.”
Rob Cookson, deputy chief executive of the LGBT Foundation, said queer people experience a “broad range of health inequalities across their lifetimes and face increased risk factors for the virus having serious health implications”. He believes the government has not done enough “to understand and act on the needs of LGBT communities during the pandemic.”
