Fewer Blacks Getting Vaccinated
01/31/2021
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From the New York Times news section:

Black and Latino New Yorkers Trail White Residents in Vaccine Rollout

Data showed that while 24% of city residents are Black, only 11% of vaccine recipients were. White New Yorkers received a disproportionate share of the shots.

By Emma G. Fitzsimmons
Jan. 31, 2021

The rollout of vaccines in New York City — once the epicenter of the pandemic — has been plagued by stark racial disparities, with Black and Latino residents receiving far fewer doses than white residents, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Sunday.

The city’s demographic data was incomplete, but the information available revealed for the first time that white New Yorkers are navigating the city’s complicated vaccination system more easily.

Asians, as usual, are of negligible interest.

Of nearly 300,000 city residents who received one dose and whose race was recorded, about 48 percent were white, 15 percent were Latino, 15 percent were Asian and 11 percent were Black. Latino and Black residents were underrepresented: The city’s population is roughly 29 percent Latino and 24 percent Black.

One reason presumably is because more blacks and Latinos came down with Covid during New York City’s turn in the barrel last spring and thus already have the defensive antibodies. It’s perfectly sensible for the already recovered to forego a new vaccine in short supply in favor of those who need it far more than they do.

The disparities were even more striking among city residents aged 65 and up: Only 9 percent of the roughly 125,000 older New Yorkers vaccinated were Black.

Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat in his second term, said he was frustrated that New Yorkers in communities of color that were hardest-hit by the pandemic were not getting vaccinated.

From the New York Times in late September:

New York City on Tuesday released more than 1.46 million coronavirus antibody test results, the largest number to date, providing more evidence of how the virus penetrated deeply into some lower-income communities while passing more lightly across affluent parts of the city.

In one ZIP code in Queens

That zip code was the ironically named Latino neighborhood of Corona near La Guardia Airport. (My guess is that airport workers were big conduits early last year connecting wealthy world travelers who came down with the disease après ski in the Dolomites and the like in February 2020 with crowded working class neighborhoods.)

, more than 50 percent of people who had gotten tested were found to have antibodies, a strikingly high rate. But no ZIP code south of 96th Street in Manhattan had a positive rate of more than 20 percent. …

But the neighborhoods with more residents who were infected at the height of New York’s outbreak in March and April may be less likely to be among the hardest hit during a second wave.

On the other hand, neighborhoods in which few residents have been infected may find themselves more vulnerable in the event of a resurgence.

So it makes epidemiological sense for more Upper East Siders to rush to get vaccinated than for many residents of Corona.

But who can remember all the way back to 2020 when alerted to the existence of racial disparities?

Back to the new NYT article:

Other cities and states across the country have seen similar racial disparities in the vaccine rollout. In New Jersey, about 48 percent of vaccine recipients were white, and only 3 percent were Black, even though about 15 percent of the state’s population is Black, according to state data. In Chicago, about 15 percent of vaccine recipients were Black and 53 percent were white.

It’s almost as if there’s a correlation between intelligence and attitudes toward the vaccine.

Also, maybe the enormous amount of emphasis by the news media in recent decades, accelerating since 2013, and reaching a crescendo in 2020-21, about how whites are out to kill black baby bodies like Emmett Till, Covid victims, George Floyd, and the Tuskegee syphilis patients may have made blacks suspicious of white people declaring that blacks should go first with this new type of vaccine. “No, no,” scream the whites telling blacks to get to the front of the line for this emergency-authorized biotechnological breakthrough, “We are the Good Whites who love black bodies, not those Bad Whites we hate. Can’t you tell????”

[Comment at Unz.com]
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