A/76/302 6. The outgoing Chair-Rapporteur, Ahmed Reid, thanked the other experts, Member States and civil society groups for their support during his tenure and welcomed the new Chair-Rapporteur. 7. Ms. Day commended the outgoing Chair-Rapporteur and expressed her gratitude for being entrusted with assuming the role at a moment that was critical to the mandate of the Working Group. C. Organization of work 8. The Working Group adopted the agenda and programme of work for its twenty seventh session. IV. “The urgency of now: systemic racism and the lessons of 2020”: summary of deliberations 9. The Working Group devoted its twenty-seventh session, held in the form of four panel discussions, to the theme “The urgency of now: systemic racism and the lessons of 2020”. In advance of the session, the Working Group issued a thematic report on COVID-19, systemic racism and global protests (A/HRC/45/44), a real-time analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic, escalating law enforcement violence and the unique challenges faced by people of African descent. The report was presented to the Human Rights Council at its forty-fifth session. 10. The first panel discussion, on the theme “COVID-19 as catastrophe and catalyst”, began with the presentation by the Chair of the Working Group of the k ey findings from the Working Group’s thematic report. In the report, the Working Group questioned the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the expectation of police impunity, and escalating police violence as isolated occurrences. To the contrary, the report showed systematic interconnections and systemic racism. The overrepresentation of people of African descent among patients with chronic disease and essential workers was no more coincidental than the disproportionate enforcement by law enforcement agents of COVID-19 regulations and public order provisions against people of African descent and anti-racism protests. These legacies of years of systemic racism and oppression were rooted in colonialism and the trade and trafficking in enslaved Africans. She noted that the predominant view of the COVID-19 pandemic as a public health emergency affecting communities equally and indiscriminately was false. She discussed the Working Group’s alternative taxonomy of the twin pandemics, COVID-19 and concurrent escalations in police violence against people of African descent, as a means to acknowledge racial disparities and to open the space to meaningfully address racial injustice and systemic racism licensed in a moment of uncertainty, instability and global fear. 11. The Chief Executive Officer and founder of Advancing Health Equity, Uché Blackstock, discussed racialized health inequities in the United States of America as a symptom of deeply rooted racism and white supremacy. Noting that Black Americans had the shortest life expectancy and the highest infant and maternal mortality rates, she further discussed the factors explaining why Black communities had borne the greatest burden of deaths from COVID-19, including the disproportionate presence of essential workers of African descent and the community’s heavy reliance on public transportation, lack of access to testing and high-quality health-care services, and the higher chronic disease burden among people of African descent. Dr. Blackstock also raised concerns about ev idence of implicit bias and negative attitudes towards Black patients among health workers, as well as about racist biases in algorithms used by health -care systems. She noted that 4/22 21-11641