{"id":177689,"date":"2021-02-13T16:48:38","date_gmt":"2021-02-13T13:48:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/ny-push-to-make-covid-vaccine-equitable-has-hurt-minorities\/"},"modified":"2021-02-13T16:48:38","modified_gmt":"2021-02-13T13:48:38","slug":"ny-push-to-make-covid-vaccine-equitable-has-hurt-minorities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/ny-push-to-make-covid-vaccine-equitable-has-hurt-minorities\/","title":{"rendered":"#NY push to make COVID vaccine \u2018equitable\u2019 has hurt minorities"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#NY push to make COVID vaccine \u2018equitable\u2019 has hurt minorities<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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The COVID-19 epidemic presents New York \u2014 and, indeed, the world \u2014 with a rare moment of enforced solidarity. The virus is no respecter of racial or economic boundaries, being all too happ<\/a>y to ride the No. 4 train from Kingsbridge Road right down to Wall Street and on to Crown Heights, hopping from white to black to Latino as easily as from Christian to Jew to Hindu or from Wall Street finance bro to vegan pastry chef in Brooklyn, with no regard at all for social<\/a> justice. The virus doesn\u2019t care about ticking demographic boxes \u2014 it just cares about the gross numbers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The people running New York\u2019s vaccination effort could learn a thing or two from the virus.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What is going to make vulnerable populations safer is not the issue of how many black, brown, immigrant, or poor people get vaccinated but how quickly we can vaccinate a large enough share of the overall population to get the epidemic under control. We are, at least in this case, all in this together.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Not that you\u2019d know it from New York\u2019s political class.<\/p>\n

With progressive leaders seeking to preempt complaints about racial and economic disparities, New York\u2019s vaccine program has been unnecessarily complex and overly restrictive from the beginning. For example, the first set of rules allowed the vaccination of some people who work at pharmacies and funeral homes but not others \u2014 and the state imposes severe penalties for violations. Misinterpret the rules and you could face a $1 million fine<\/a> and jail time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And so vaccine doses went to waste<\/a> when providers could not round up enough qualifying patients to use all of their allotted doses before they expired. New York would have been better off if every 1,000 expiring doses had simply been given to the first 1,000 people collared on the street. Instead, those expired doses went in the trash.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The pursuit of \u201cequity\u201d left everybody worse off.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Along with the elderly and essential workers, priority was also given to black and Latino neighborhoods that were identified by the Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity \u2014 and where the majority of the city\u2019s vaccination sites are now located. Some sites are restricted by borough of residency, others are restricted by occupation (a Queens site is partly restricted to those with taxi driver\u2019s licenses) and other criteria. Some 60 percent of the reservations at the Fort Washington Armory have been reserved to residents of Washington Heights, Inwood, the South Bronx, and parts of Harlem. And there is a good medical reason for prioritizing these communities, which are among those hit hardest by the epidemic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Vaccine
Vaccine sites, like this one in Yankee Stadium, are designed to help the communities hit hardest by COVID.<\/figcaption>
Instagram @nygovcuomo<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But it also makes sense to have enough discretion and flexibility in the program to maximize the use of all available resources. The current restrictions have resulted in the one thing New York should be trying to avoid: vaccinating fewer people than it could. Rather than trying to ensure that flexibility, Gov. Cuomo has terrorized providers with threats of million-dollar fines and criminal indictments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even with all those heavy-handed measures in place, black and Latino New Yorkers are being vaccinated at a rate lower than whites. Whites make up about a third of New York\u2019s population but account for nearly half of those who have been vaccinated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Age contributes to this: New York has more whites over 65 than Latinos or African Americans, so a program that favors the elderly will skew more white than does the city overall. But there are other factors at play, too: African Americans and Latinos report heightened skepticism and hesitancy regarding the vaccine, often citing concerns such as insurance coverage or immigration status, both of which are irrelevant to receiving the vaccine. Anti-vaccine conspiracy groups have specifically targeted African Americans<\/a> with reminders about such abuses as the Tuskegee syphilis study, an unethical experiment in which black Americans were used as unwitting lab rats.\u00a0<\/p>\n

New York has managed to get the worst of both worlds: a highly restrictive and highly politicized program that somehow managed to achieve the opposite of its intended outcome. Similar stories have played out in other big, Democrat-run cities from Washington to Dallas.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"States
West Virginia has used the National Guard to successfully deploy the vaccine to the public.<\/figcaption>
AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Compare these rollouts with the experience of West Virginia, which has serious challenges \u2014 including a relatively poor, dispersed, and rural population \u2014 but took a much less restrictive approach to its vaccinations. Rather than try to shut out commuters or rigidly enforce an inflexible eligibility schedule, West Virginia has relied on some reasonably effective institutions \u2014 the National Guard and Walgreens \u2014 and managed its priorities more loosely where vaccine supply has allowed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The difference in results is stark: For every three New York state residents vaccinated, West Virginia vaccinates four<\/a>. That\u2019s important, because what actually matters most is not the political fallout from who gets the vaccine first but how large a share of the total population gets vaccinated quickly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In short, rules meant to protect the poor and the powerless have hindered the overall vaccination effort. And the very people those rules were meant to help are being hurt the most.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kevin D. Williamson is the author of \u201cBig White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the \u2018Real America<\/a>,\u2019 \u201d out now.<\/em>\n <\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#NY push to make COVID vaccine \u2018equitable\u2019 has hurt minorities” The COVID-19 epidemic presents New York \u2014 and, indeed, the world \u2014 with a rare moment of enforced solidarity. The virus is no respecter of racial or economic boundaries, being all too happy to ride the No. 4 train from Kingsbridge Road right down to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":177690,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/02\/covid-vaccine-3.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[93136,82862,78534,21774],"class_list":["post-177689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-2-13-21","tag-covid-vaccine","tag-minorities","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}