The Affirmative Action Vaccine

No one wants white privilege. Being white can cost you a job, a raise, or admission to an Ivy League college. Now, it might even kill you.

The Centers for Disease Control advised states to consider non-whites a critical group for vaccine distribution. About half the states, including “red states” such as Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming, want to give blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians the vaccine first. It’s affirmative action vaccination.

No one is hiding this plan. A committee of experts that advises the CDC urged that “essential workers” get the vaccine ahead of the elderly. This might seem surprising because old people are far more likely than others to die from COVID-19. It is not even close.

However, in the funhouse of American policy-making, it’s fine to let old people get the virus. “Historically, the committee relied on scientific evidence to inform its decisions,” said the New York Times. “But now the members are weighing social justice concerns as well.” So much for “trusting the science.”

What does “social justice” mean? More dead whites.

Committee member Dr. Peter Szilagyi: “To me the issue of ethics is very significant, very important for the country, and clearly favors the essential worker group because of the high proportion of minority, low-income and low education workers among essential workers.”

Ethics professor Harald Schmidt, also quoted in the Times, was even more blunt: “Older populations are whiter. Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.” Dare we call this another aspect of the Great Replacement?

Prof. Schmidt is completely wrong. Hispanics live longer than whites. Asians live longer than Hispanics. Whites come in third, and the gap in average lifespan between blacks and whites is smaller than the one between whites and Asians. If Prof. Schmidt wanted to “level the playing field a bit,” he’d have to start culling Asians. To explain something that isn’t even true by claiming society is “structured in a way” to advantage whites is just the sort of nonsense we can count on from the New York Times.

When governors around the country imposed lockdowns that crushed small businesses, it was supposed to protect the elderly. Indeed, some journalists and activists said President Trump, who was skeptical of lockdowns, wanted to “kill” the elderly.

• UK Independent: “Thanks Mr. President, but I asked my grandparents and they don’t want to die for your economy,” March 24, 2020
• DailyKos: “GOP Telling Grandma to Die Is Nothing New,” March 25, 2020
• Cleveland Scene: “With Covid Vaccine Coming, Will Ohio Legislature Still Insist on Our ‘Freedom’ to Kill Others?” December 14, 2020
• The Philadelphia Inquirer: “From Terre Haute to Tehran to your grandma, Trumpism is revealed as a death cult in the end,” November 29, 2020

Older people are in danger. The CDC reports that people between 75 and 84 are eight times more likely to be hospitalized and 220 times more likely to die from the disease than those 18–29. (Joe Biden is 78). Those over 85 are 650 times more likely to die. The Democrats won the last election (if they did) partly because they took away President Trump’s support among seniors. The virus and hostile media coverage of how Mr. Trump handled it were huge factors.

If President Trump were the authoritarian his foes imagine, he could have ordered national lockdowns, appealed to fear, and perhaps won the election by posing as father-protector. President Trump instead let Americans decide for themselves. That was a political mistake, but not necessarily a policy mistake.

I take COVID-19 seriously. I know people who died from it. However, lockdowns are not without cost. They can lead to job losses, poverty, weight gain, drug overdoses, depression, divorce, and countless other problems. People die from them just as they do from COVID-19. With time, we could find lockdowns did more harm than good.

Besides, did lockdowns and liberal governors save grandma? New York Governor Andrew Cuomo had time to write a book, accept an Emmy, and give his brother self-congratulatory interviews on CNN during the crisis, but even far-left outlets such as ProPublica say his COVID-19 policy may have made things worse: “New York was the only state in the nation that barred [COVID-19] testing of those being placed or returning to nursing homes.”

In May, President Trump tweeted about a shocking attack by a young black man on an elderly white man in a nursing home in Michigan. The attacker filmed his own savage crime. Why was the young man in the nursing home at all? A hospital sent him there after he was diagnosed with COVID-19. It’s especially outrageous because Governor Gretchen Whitmer imposed drastic lockdowns supposedly designed to protect people from the pandemic.

In July, the white victim died. There was little media coverage. About a week later, Governor Whitmer signed an executive order saying the public health crisis was “racism.” The goal is “health equity,” and the cure is to “elevate Black voices.”

The Atlantic admits that liberal California has “lost control” of the virus. The Golden State just broke its own record for COVID-19 hospitalizations. The worst area is reportedly Los Angeles County, which, in terms of population, is part of the Third World. Some blame Angelenos for not following social distancing rules, but Governor Gavin Newsom isn’t following them either. Who can blame ordinary people for following his example?

The COVID-19 pandemic is not President Trump’s fault, and liberal governors who hate him hardly covered themselves with glory. However, here we are, with vaccines that can supposedly save us. Isn’t it time to “save grandma” by making sure she gets it first? Apparently not. Now it’s time to achieve “racial equity” – meaning equality of outcomes, not opportunity – by giving it to non-whites first.

• “Covid-19 is devastating communities of color. Can vaccines counter racial inequity?” Washington Post, December 18, 2020
• “Health experts want to prioritize people of color for a COVID-19 vaccine. But how should it be done?”, Stat, November 9, 2020
• “Vaccinating Black Americans Is Essential. Key States Aren’t Doing the Work to Combat Hesitancy,” ProPublica, December 18, 2020

Yes, there’s a case to make for medical workers getting the vaccine first. You could even argue that younger people with more years to live should get preference. But this isn’t what journalists and ethicists are saying, and it isn’t what states are debating. They’re deciding whether to ration a potentially life-saving injection according to race. It’s a step towards the situation in the United Kingdom, where the National Health Service can deny non-critical care to “racist or sexist” patients – and remember, many people now argue that all whites are racist, no matter what they do.

I’ll echo Professor Schmidt and be blunt. These policies are anti-white and hateful. Almost everyone would recognize this if any other group were victims.

And there are two other considerations. First, race is a biological reality. Different health outcomes aren’t always the result of social conditions. For example, high black mortality in childbirth is a fashionable political issue. Future vice president Kamala Harris even introduced legislation to fight it, calling it a crisis. However, Hispanics have a lower child mortality rate than whites. Native Hawaiians do, too. If we can’t say that this could have a biological cause, then we must conclude that the system is “systematically biased” towards Hispanics and Hawaiians.

Vaccines are about biology, not ideology, and they may not work the same for all people. A study from MIT found that the vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer may be less effective on blacks or Asians. Is the vaccine “racist?” Of course not. However, we can’t discuss race, so we can’t make rational policy choices on healthcare, even if they might save more Black Lives (which, I am told, Matter).

Indeed, Nature magazine now says it will not publish papers that could raise “concerns related to implications for the group under study or broader society implications.” As in the Chernobyl disaster, those who control information twist the truth to uphold ideology. That ideology may hurt the people it claims to help, but it doesn’t matter. The lie is more important than lives.

Those who want “health equity” must face a second problem of their own making. Most blacks don’t trust vaccines. These vaccines (and there are several coming online that act in different ways) have side effects. Pfizer’s vaccine may cause allergic reactions. Though journalists have repeatedly criticized President Trump as the “anti-vaccine candidate” who causes his followers to doubt “experts,” blacks and Hispanics are more suspicious of the vaccines than whites. Fewer than 20 percent of blacks think vaccines will be safe. Dr. Anthony Fauci’s praise of a black woman scientist, Kizzmekia Corbett, who he said helped develop one of the vaccines will not change this. Earlier this year, Dr. Corbett wondered whether COVID-19 were not “genocide” against blacks.

For years, historians and journalists have promoted the Tuskegee hoax that scientists “experimented” on blacks in the 1930s, refusing to treat them for syphilis. This isn’t what happened. Nonetheless, because this myth spread and is often recited, blacks distrust medical authorities. Those who promote “health equity” are always harping on “racism” in medicine from decades ago. NPR recently aired an interview with “writer and ethicist” Harriet Washington, author of Medical Apartheid. She blames “four centuries of abuse in the medical arena” for blacks’ reluctance to take the vaccine. Today explains blacks’ lack of trust on “medical experimentation’s racist history.” “Years of medical abuse make Black Americans less likely to trust the coronavirus vaccine,” claims the Washington Post.

What happens if a black person, who gets a priority vaccination, dies from side effects? What happens if a black person dies, even from unrelated causes, after taking the vaccine? Rumors will spread, the ghost of Tuskegee will emerge, and I suspect we will hear more rubbish about white scientists “experimenting” on blacks.

Whites can’t win. If the vaccines work and are safe, we must sacrifice our grandparents to ensure “health equity.” If blacks get priority and something goes wrong, this will be another case of medical “racism.”

Some political battles are zero-sum, but medicine shouldn’t be. This is a technical problem that should have one correct solution. There is a right way to handle a pandemic, to judge costs and benefits of lockdowns, or study whether a vaccine works. There’s also a right way to determine who should get vaccinated first.

Multiracialism makes it impossible to set rational goals. Instead, we must constantly cater to non-white delusions and claims of victimization. We are so politically crippled that the world’s sole superpower can’t solve a basic responsibility of government. What should be objective analysis disappears into the black hole of “racism.”

COVID-19 is serious, but it’s certainly not the Black Death. Still, it is tearing our society apart. China, where the disease originated, is emerging stronger than ever. The “health” of a nation isn’t just biological or material. It’s psychological and spiritual.

America’s problem isn’t just that our people are unhealthy. It’s that we are consumed with an inner rot, a cancer that’s consuming everything our ancestors gave us. Until it’s cut out, the rot will spread until there is nothing left. It will be a desolation, which they will call “equity.”