This was utterly predictable. When vaccine uptake slowed down after the first few months of 2021, newspapers and broadcasters were quick to talk about supposed fears of vaccination among Black Americans, or poor acceptance by immigrant communities. Only that’s not what was happening. What was happening was a politicization of the vaccine that saw Republicans—overwhelmingly white Republicans—rejecting the vaccine due to what seemed like an unending list of ridiculous conspiracy theories.
While Black neighborhoods were desperately asking to be allocated more vaccines, Republicans and right-wing media were actively working to undermine the vaccine. As early as the first week of March, vaccination sites set up in Republican-heavy areas were seeing vaccine thrown into the trash after only a tiny percentage of the population turned up to be vaccinated. Even just a few weeks into the vaccine rollout, a direct correlation could be drawn between areas of low vaccination rates and those that voted for Trump. Some Republican states went so far as to pay people to refuse the vaccine.
And now no one should be able to say that they didn’t see this New York Times article coming: “Over the past year, the COVID-19 death rate for white Americans has been 14% higher than the rate for Black Americans and 72% higher than the Latino rate, according to the latest C.D.C. data.”
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With the influx of the omicron family of variants and subvariants mixed with desperate efforts to return to normal—which, in Republican-led states have generally included regulations against masks, social distancing, or vaccine requirements—it’s impossible to say just how many cases of COVID-19 the U.S. is experiencing at the moment. Testing rates are low, but positive results are high. That’s not good.
I argued on several occasions that COVID-19 could not be allowed to become endemic. It turns out that it certainly can ... so long as America is willing to accept hundreds of deaths each day and a legacy of lasting health effects that will disrupt life over decades. Welcome to the new normal.
Right now, in spite of an abundance of at-home testing, almost none of which gets reported to any health officials, the U.S. is averaging over 100,000 new cases of COVID-19 a day. New hospital admissions are up to over 4,000 cases a day. To absolutely no one’s surprise, Florida continues to top the charts, with over 11,000 cases on Wednesday. U.S. deaths from COVID-19 are currently running around 300 a day, That’s not the unbelievable 4,000 a day that we hit in early 2021. But it’s more than the number of Americans killed by guns or in highway accidents combined. Move along, nothing to see here.
But the most shocking/not shocking part of the latest numbers is the way that white Americans have moved to the top of the death charts.
That wasn’t true early on. Black communities had much higher death rates early on, in the pre-vaccine days, for the reasons that Black communities always have higher death rates: poor health care availability and quality. The same was true of immigrant communities in many areas, and in Native American nations. The Navajo Nation in particular was ravaged by COVID-19 in the early months of the pandemic. When treatment for COVID-19 pre-vaccine meant availability of high-quality care and equipment such as ventilators, the advantage that the white community had was simply huge.
As vaccines became available, the gap between these communities closed. Community organizers in Black neighborhoods worked tirelessly to obtain more vaccine and to make it available to people who normally had little access to healthcare. The same thing happened in the Navajo Nation, where dedicated volunteers and community leaders brought their community to one of the highest vaccination levels in the U.S.
But even as these communities were working harder and harder to get vaccines to everyone, Republican leaders and right-wing media were working harder and harder to stop vaccines from becoming universal.
Only about 60 percent of Republican adults are vaccinated, compared with about 75 percent of independents and more than 90 percent of Democrats, according to Kaiser. And Republicans are both disproportionately white and older. Together, these facts help explain why the white death rate has recently been higher than the Asian, Black or Latino rate.
To reach the point where the white death rate from COVID-19 is higher than that in the Black and Latino communities, the vaccination rate among white Americans had to be so poor that it more than overcame the quality of care available to those communities. Republicans are so dedicated to the idea of using the vaccine as a means of showing their distrust of government that they literally threw away all the advantages that were inherent in the health care system.
White Republicans have been worrying about some kind of conspiracy to replace them with Black people or immigrants. It turns out there is such a conspiracy. And white Republicans are running it.