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“Seems” is not a scientific conclusion. Correlation doesn’t support the conclusion. The official reason is people of color have been denied proper health is our racist society. Equity.
I have absolutely no problem with prioritizing scarce medications to those that need it the most. Actually, some may be so far along with complications, they might be denied. Tough choices.
The medical condition of a white, black, Asian and Latino should be used. Four candidates. Why choose based upon race? Do the white and Asian deserve denial? Or do you do all blacks first, then Latinos? Before you unload, I have black, Hispanic, white and mixed of each in my extended family. I am opposed to discrimination in all forms. Each is an individual and gets treated equally (except for my wife). Where I would seek guidance would be a mid 30’s obese vs a health 94 year old. I could actually go with the 30 year old. More years of benefit unless the advice was the weight problem was too much. Tough choices. Suitable candidate and advice, I would call race in the criteria “prejudice”. Predetermined based on race without considering the individuals.
Omicron has left the medical community in the dust. A vaccine is to prevent infection. Our vaccines no longer do that with Omicron. Vaccines are being used as treatments. The effectiveness is so terrible in prevention, they would have never been approved! Even the WHO knows that.
“It would be irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen they target. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening here.”
Delta it worked, Omicron it didn’t.
I am vaccinated but some of the people in my extended family need to work, need to get vaccinated but don’t deserve priority based on skin color. Don’t mandate a vaccine, kick them out of work and then tell me they deserve priority. Raw race data is racist and needs to be trashed.
You are confusing the reason for a fact with the fact itself. People of color do worse with COVID. This is a fact. They are more likely to die. You are making judgements about how this fact came to be. I am not. We give older people more priority, we give people with hypertension more priority, we give obese people more priority, we give people with diabetes more priority. It is also a fact that all those people are more likely to die. Do you say we are prejudiced against non-obese people, or younger people? You do not. You do understand it is not ethical to take each individual and say "hmm, I think this person's life is worth more" right? There is a scoring system. It includes factors that increase risk of death. You give meds to people with higher scores. No prejudice, no ethical problem. I said you could disagree all you want, but understand that your disagreement is from your feelings and not from logic or science. In fact, I haven't even given my opinion, merely stated that facts of the situation. Including significant risk factors in a non-judgemental way is science.
Also, "I have such and such family and friends" is never a useful thing to say. Who you are, who you know, and who you are related to has absolutely nothing to do with this area of discussion. I'm not questioning views on race, just pointing out the I am taking about facts and you are talking about feelings. Some of us probably have feelings about other risk factors (obesity anyone?) but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use them in evaluating who to treat. Oh, and data can't be racist.
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