Not in the places you’d expect
A growing collection of data on vaccination rates suggests significant disparities along racial lines in terms of how quickly different communities are being immunized. With that in mind, let’s get the unavoidable question out of the way first. Why is racism so prevalent in Joe Biden’s America? (Hey… they did it for four years. Turnabout is fair play.) It’s hard to deny there is definitely some lag in the system, even with much of the data being incomplete. That’s because not all contact tracing stations and vaccination centers are collecting racial data. But as the Associated Press reports this weekend, for the places where such data has been made available, Whites are getting injections at pretty much the projected rate based on their percentage of the local population, while Black and Hispanic residents are mostly below the per capita levels we should expect to see. What may come as a shock to our liberal friends are the states and cities where the worst disparities are appearing. A racial gap has opened up in the nation’s COVID-19 vaccination drive, with Black Americans in many places lagging behind whites in receiving shots, an Associated Press analysis shows. An early look at the 17 states and two cities that have released racial breakdowns through Jan.25 found that Black people in all places are getting inoculated at levels below their share of the general population, in some cases significantly below. That is true even though they constitute an oversize percentage of the nation’s health care workers, who were put at the front of the line for shots when the campaign began in mid-December.
