Blacks to receive priority for Whu Hoo Chicken Flu vaccine because 1619, or something.
“This would incorporate the variables that the committee believes are most linked to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on people of color,” the NASEM press release said. “Black, Hispanic or Latinx, American Indian and Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 with higher rates of transmission, morbidity, and mortality.”
— snip
“It’s racial inequality — inequality in housing, inequality in employment, inequality in access to health care — that produced the underlying diseases,” Dr. Dayna Bowen Matthew, dean of George Washington University Law School, told The New York Times. “That’s wrong. And it’s that inequality that requires us to prioritize by race and ethnicity.”
But there’s this: A survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and The Undefeated in October found that half of black adults do not plan on getting the vaccine.
The good news is that on Monday, Moderna announced that, contrary to its original estimate of a seven-day shelf-life for its vaccine and a requirement that it be stored in super-cold freezers, it now believes that it will have a 30-day life, and can be stored in ordinary freezers found in doctors’ offices and pharmacies. That alleviates a prime worry, what to do with vaccine doses that are refused by blacks: throw them out or give them to (gasp), white folk? Without the urgency to distribute the stuff before it goes bad, there will be more time to mount a persuasion campaign. Mind you, the question will arise as the expiration date approaches. On day 21, for instance, does a pharmacy open its doors to the non-privleged classes or hold on, hoping for a last-minute rush of approved recipients?
Regardless, I’d bet that the racial difference could be largely addressed merely by prioritizing health care workers. In Maine, at least, many more blacks have contracted the disease than would be predicted by their numbers in the state (14, at last count), but they got their dose from where they worked: nursing homes and hospitals. It’s common for non-English-speaking refugees and illegal aliens to work in low-paying jobs, and the bottom rung of health care is often where those jobs are found.
That said, I have no dog in this hunt; I don’t intend to get a vaccine, and will rely instead on the certain knowledge that something’s going to get me: cancer, heart disease, a compromised respiratory system or simple, cardboard-box-on-the-sidewalk poverty. No one I know has shuffled off this mortal coil alive.
But it does bother me that we’re explictly injecting race into the distribution of health care. Advocates of the poor will argue that we’re already doing so by our greedy capitalist system, but up to now, and since the 50s, racial discrimination has been prohibited in our country That’s changing, and that’s probably not a good thing.
