In the first of a new series of interviews for HQM, Hannah Fearn sits down with fellow social affairs journalist Saba Salman to discuss the very personal issues explored in her revealing new book, Double Discrimination.

It was during the first Covid lockdown that the author and journalist Saba Salman realised her younger sister Raana was at very high risk of an untimely death. She wasn’t physically vulnerable to the disease and carried no underlying condition such as diabetes. She wasn’t taking immunosuppressants. But Raana, back then a young woman in her early 30s, lives with a learning disability and is also of British Pakistani heritage.

Within weeks of the pandemic breaking out, a grim statistic emerged: people with learning disabilities were far more likely to perish from Covid than any other groups in society, and for learning disabled people of colour the chance of death was more than 30 times higher.

Read the full article from HQM here.