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State Sen. Michelle Au Calls On Georgia To Do More To Protect Asian Americans

While the investigation into Tuesday’s shootings is just beginning, state Sen. Michelle Au said on “Morning Edition” that this event is another in a long history of violence against people of Asian descent in this country. CREDIT GEORGIA GENERAL ASSEMBLY
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LISA RAYAM, CHRISTOPHER ALSTON •

Georgia state Sen. Michelle Au has long been concerned about the safety of Asian Americans here in Georgia, so much so she went before her fellow lawmakers to speak about it Monday.

On Tuesday, there were a series of shootings at massage spas in and around Atlanta — eight people were killed and six of the victims were Asian women. The shootings have not been ruled a hate crime, with police citing suspect Robert Aaron Long’s statement that he was motivated instead by a sexual addiction.

Au spoke to “Morning Edition” host Lisa Rayam about how she sees this incident in the broader context of an ongoing spike of discrimination against Asian Americans related to misinformation about the coronavirus.

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MSNBC’s 11th Hour

GA Democrat warned of anti-Asian violence hours before Atlanta shootings

The day before the deadly shootings across the Atlanta area, Democratic State Senator Dr. Michelle Au spoke out in the state capitol about anti-Asian violence. She joined MSNBC’s Brian Williams to discuss that and more.
 
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Atlanta Magazine

How chronic underfunding fueled
Georgia’s Covid-19 vaccine woes

Advocates warn federal support doesn’t offer a permanent solution,
nor will it ease chronic understaffing

 

An emergency room nurse in Savannah receives a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in December 2020. PHOTOGRAPH BY SEAN RAYFORD/GETTY IMAGES

BY
JANUARY 26, 2021
 

When Amber Schmidtke was a medical school professor in Macon, she started a research project to better understand why so many of the state’s kids were behind on their childhood immunizations. In 2017, Georgia was the slowest state in the nation to get three-year-olds fully vaccinated against infections like measles and whooping cough. Schmidtke found that a major reason for the state’s poor performance was the Georgia Registry of Immunization Transactions and Services—abbreviated, obviously, as GRITS.

Created in 1996, GRITS was initially designed to ensure children statewide were benefiting from federal vaccination programs by tracking immunizations given mostly in pediatricians’ offices and by county health departments. It was built for “more of a trickle than a flood,” says Schmitdke, and was so infrequently used to track adult vaccinations that most internists had no clue how to use it.

Schmidtke wasn’t particularly surprised, then, to hear that during the state’s massive Covid-19 vaccination rollout effort, GRITS had become a particularly gluey cog in the public health machine, its crashes and delays leading to dramatically underreported levels of vaccine administration statewide. But she was stunned when, during a January 19 hearing before the Georgia legislature, health department director Kathleen Toomey requested only minimal additional funding for public health in the 2022 budget.

The Lily

She’s on the front lines of the pandemic.
And running for office.

Michelle Au could become the first Asian American woman to serve as a state senator in Georgia.

By Soo Youn
 

A local Georgia race that hasn’t attracted much attention could make history if Michelle Au becomes the first Asian American woman to serve as a senator in the state’s legislature.

On Tuesday, Au, a 41-year old Chinese American anesthesiologist in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, won her district’s Democratic primary against 53-year-old Bangladeshi American health care entrepreneur Josh Uddin.

Technically, the state was still counting ballots on Thursday, but local media, including the Atlanta Journal Constitution, called the race for Au with 77 percent of the votes to Uddin’s 23 percent after a chaotic primary voting day that foreshadows potential problems with November’s general election.

“They’ve called the race and we feel good about where it is,” Au said.