Vermont prioritises BIPOC over white people for COVID-19 vaccine

[laughing dog]

I am in constant awe at your ability to construct such bullshit straw men so consistently.

Calling it bullshit doesn't make it go away.

History educated me that calling your crap @ bullshit” will not make it go away.

Even if the racial risk is real the age risk is far greater than the racial risk.

You missed my point.

 

[Arctish]

I am in constant awe at your ability to construct such bullshit straw men so consistently.

Calling it bullshit doesn't make it go away. Even if the racial risk is real the age risk is far greater than the racial risk.

The information contained in the OP link indicate that all Vermonters 40 years of age and older are eligible for vaccination. It's the very first group listed in the Who can get vaccinated now? tab. So I don't understand why people are arguing over it.

Metaphor says he does not object to some Vermonters being vaccinated before others. His one quibble appears to be that young adult non-whites became eligible for vaccination before Whites of the same age. The evidence of greater need of vaccination for non-whites due to measurable differences in mortality and outcomes apparently doesn't matter, just the Constitutional question.

I'm not a Constitutional scholar but I do know that Alaska gave priority to vaccine distribution in Native communities, and pretty much everyone around here said "That makes sense".

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

The problem is that you are assuming the pattern actually is racial and not socioeconomic. What we did here was prioritize people in jobs that expose them to a lot of other people.

No, the problem is that you are okay with dividing up by socio-economic class but not race while both are constitutionally protected if either is in this context. Therefore your argument is hypocritical. Please present a cogent argument of what you actually want to do.

Finally, your whole weird claim that this is zero sum game is just that--weird. It's actually a statistical game. Each vaccination is worth more to African Americans or Native Americans than to Whites on a given day because the probability of death is higher among those groups. It's a decimal, not a whole number. Just as a mere example, the vaccine could be worth .005 lives to a senior citizen, .002 lives to a 30 year old Native American, .001 lives to a 30 year old African American, and .0005 lives to a 30 year old White American ON AVERAGE. (These are not actual numbers, just an example) BUT You are saving in total MORE LIVES by having a risk order policy.

As always, assuming racism.

Racism isn't an assumption, it is an historical fact.

There's no road to hell here...it's a nuance and it's already being done by age across the whole country. People only started hysterically screaming about it when a very small state with a low rate of covid and a small minority population agreed to include race into their system of triage... Because it saves more lives than otherwise not doing it.

The age difference poses far more risk than the supposed "racial" risk.

Yes, the protected class of age has more risk than over certain sub-populations which is why I wrote the following: "the vaccine could be worth .005 lives to a senior citizen, .002 lives to a 30 year old Native American, .001 lives to a 30 year old African American, and .0005 lives to a 30 year old White American ON AVERAGE." See how age is the primary component since being a senior citizen (OF ANY RACE) has more value to the vaccine than all racial breakdowns of non-senior citizens. And this is exactly what the Vermont plan does because in the first phase they have 75+ getting vaccinated, then 70+, and so on etc etc with more age brackets, up to a particular age bracket point where they allow BIPOC, then continue with more phases of age brackets. Why does this make sense? It's because at the high-end of age, age is far more of a risk than race, but at a mid-level point they are closer risks, and at a low age, race is a bigger factor.

You, on the other hand, are arguing out of both sides of your mouth, on one side saying race being discrimination because you agree with Metaphor, and on the other side of your mouth saying it should be done by age and socio-economic class, even though those would also both be discrimination, if race is.

What the fuck? Please explain this discrepancy.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Not when there is a large number of patients due to an accident, fire, or similar disaster.

In such cases, when there are a large number of urgent/potentially urgent cases, then yes, whoever is working triage will organize them as quickly as possible according to the urgency/potential life threatening need. It could be: whoever was in vehicle A or in Chem Room 207 or anyone under 15? Or Over 65 or with asthma or unconscious, etc.

The threat to the individual patients. A quick triage flowchart:



See anything in there that applies to groups of people?

 

[Metaphor]

The information contained in the OP link indicate that all Vermonters 40 years of age and older are eligible for vaccination. It's the very first group listed in the Who can get vaccinated now? tab. So I don't understand why people are arguing over it.

laughing dog made a claim that I was either a liar or a sloppy reader because I said it would be better to prioritise a 45 year old white person over a 19 year old BIPOC. I don't know why he thinks this statement is a lie. You'd have to ask him, because he has not been able to articulate why. Nobody else has taken up the mantle of explaining what he meant, either, which makes me think they don't know why he thinks what I wrote was a lie.

Metaphor says he does not object to some Vermonters being vaccinated before others. His one quibble appears to be that young adult non-whites became eligible for vaccination before Whites of the same age.

Vermont has erased its original timeline of vaccine priorities so it is now difficult to reconstruct. However, on April 1, all BIPOC people 16+ who did not fit another category were made eligible, and at the same time white people who did not fit in another category had to be 50 or older to qualify on their age (before that it was 60 or older, but I don't know when they were prioritised compared to the "BIPOC" category).

The evidence of greater need of vaccination for non-whites due to measurable differences in mortality and outcomes apparently doesn't matter, just the Constitutional question.

I did not say it didn't matter. I asked if it was Constitutional in my OP. Don2 twice called this OP "screaming hysteria".

I also questioned why BIPOC would be prioritised over white people but men not prioritised over women (given men's risk compared to women is similar to BIPOC risk compared to white people), why BIPOC were given higher priority than people in their 40s when the age effect is by far the strongest predictor (orders of magnitude) of sickness and death, and why Asians were included in the priority group when Asians have either the same or lower risk of COVID sickness and death.

 

[Arctish]

Metaphor says he does not object to some Vermonters being vaccinated before others. His one quibble appears to be that young adult non-whites became eligible for vaccination before Whites of the same age.

Vermont has erased its original timeline of vaccine priorities so it is now difficult to reconstruct. However, on April 1, all BIPOC people 16+ who did not fit another category were made eligible, and at the same time white people who did not fit in another category had to be 50 or older to qualify on their age (before that it was 60 or older, but I don't know when they were prioritised compared to the "BIPOC" category).

So basically what I said.

The evidence of greater need of vaccination for non-whites due to measurable differences in mortality and outcomes apparently doesn't matter, just the Constitutional question.

I did not say it didn't matter. I asked if it was Constitutional in my OP. Don2 twice called this OP "screaming hysteria".

I also questioned why BIPOC would be prioritised over white people but men not prioritised over women (given men's risk compared to women is similar to BIPOC risk compared to white people), why BIPOC were given higher priority than people in their 40s when the age effect is by far the strongest predictor (orders of magnitude) of sickness and death, and why Asians were included in the priority group when Asians have either the same or lower risk of COVID sickness and death.

Did you look into the matter on the Vermont Dept. of Health pages, or see if there was a discussion among Vermonters when it was decided how vaccine distribution would be handled? Or did you just conclude that Whites were being discriminated against for no good reason despite being the overwhelming majority in Vermont?

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Only by sticking your head in the sand about the age risk. Since nobody on the left seems capable of verifying what we are saying, here's the data:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/201...s-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-age.html

Quit trying to sacrifice people on the altar of racism.

Did you seperate those death rates by race? No. So you cannot make that determination.

According to this Stanford Medicine study the disease is significantly more deadly to blacks and hispanics

I am not completely convinced that the policy-makers motivations were only in regard to survival rates, though I think this was a significant part. I think one of the other things going on was that they were trying to counter predicted racial disparities that would also occur in the vaccination program itself. So, for example, it is well-known that there is more distrust by Blacks of the medical establishment and government because of how the government has historically treated Blacks, medical experiments are an example. There's also the issue of unequal access and quality difference which not only applies to later treatment of covid affecting those death rates but also it ought to be predicted to apply to access and quality of the vaccinations. So for example, I don't think that the vast majority of eligible minorities were out running to get scheduled or even necessarily had access to the information they were eligible or means to schedule as easily straight away. Plus, I'd point out that the younger minorities are probably afraid to go get the vaccination for the additional reason that someone may call them out as reverse racialists. I will also add that even another reason to do this is as a positive gesture to the minority communities so that they can start to trust the system more often and go out and get the vaccine. In these examples, I'd call it lag--that the lag of vaccination for minorities is more and so while a few minorities may get into the first age bracket, the brunt of them would be expected to be downstream.

Now to examine this question, I've just started googling and found an interesting article:

Two weeks after the state of Vermont started offering vaccination clinics for Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), the racial disparity in COVID vaccination rates persists.

Data shows BIPOC have higher infection and hospitalization rates in Vermont and across the country, which is why the state decided to prioritize them in the vaccine rollout.

The Vermont Health Department says there’s still a 13% gap between vaccinated white Vermonters versus BIPOC Vermonters.

Deputy Health Commissioner Tracy Dolan says officials hope to make more progress after the decision this week to allow BIPOC Vermonters 16 and older to begin registering for the vaccine.

“That gap should start to close,” Dolan said.

As of Friday, 7,953 eligible BIPOC in the state have gotten their first shot of the vaccine. That’s 22% of the BIPOC population 16 and older. It’s also 13% lower than the 35% of vaccinated white Vermonters.

Dolan says the department expects more BIPOC will get vaccinated in the coming weeks as they make more age groups eligible for the shot. She says that’s because there are more young BIPOC in the state than older.

https://www.wcax.com/2021/04/03/rac...-remains-at-13-despite-bipoc-focused-clinics/

and here's another article:

Reflecting a nationwide trend, Vermont’s Covid-19 case rates and vaccination rates have indicated racial inequities in health care access. Per capita case rates have consistently been highest among people of color. The same populations have also been vaccinated at lower rates than white people.

In announcing the new eligibility guidelines last week, the state said just 20% of BIPOC Vermonters had received a vaccine at that point, compared to 33% of non-Hispanic white Vermont residents.

On Monday, the Republican governor defended the decision to widen vaccine eligibility for people of color as a necessary step toward reversing those inequities.

“In addition to the greater risk of hospitalization among BIPOC community members, the pace of vaccination for these individuals is too far behind the white population,” Scott said. “These disparities are unacceptable to me.”

https://vtdigger.org/2021/04/06/sco...to-prioritizing-vaccinating-bipoc-vermonters/

Emphasis added. This also means that when we try to analyze which demographic groups' vaccinations are being utilized in the alternative vaccination program, we have to put that lag into the model.

 

[laughing dog]

laughing dog made a claim that I was either a liar or a sloppy reader because I said it would be better to prioritise a 45 year old white person over a 19 year old BIPOC. I don't know why he thinks this statement is a lie. You'd have to ask him, because he has not been able to articulate why.

That is false. I did in post 88 and again in post 122.

I will articulate it for the 3rd time.
If you knew the age had been lowered to 40 when you wrote your response about 45 year olds, then you wrote a lie, because 45+ year olds were eligibile at the time of your response. Since I do not think you would not lie, it must be that you did not read your own link before you made that response.

 

[Metaphor]

So basically what I said.

The evidence of greater need of vaccination for non-whites due to measurable differences in mortality and outcomes apparently doesn't matter, just the Constitutional question.

I did not say it didn't matter. I asked if it was Constitutional in my OP. Don2 twice called this OP "screaming hysteria".

I also questioned why BIPOC would be prioritised over white people but men not prioritised over women (given men's risk compared to women is similar to BIPOC risk compared to white people), why BIPOC were given higher priority than people in their 40s when the age effect is by far the strongest predictor (orders of magnitude) of sickness and death, and why Asians were included in the priority group when Asians have either the same or lower risk of COVID sickness and death.

Did you look into the matter on the Vermont Dept. of Health pages, or see if there was a discussion among Vermonters when it was decided how vaccine distribution would be handled? Or did you just conclude that Whites were being discriminated against for no good reason despite being the overwhelming majority in Vermont?

How on earth can you ask that question having just read what I've written?

When I said Vermont was discriminating by race, I did not say "and therefore that is completely unacceptable". I said when the State decides to hand out life-saving bennies and wants to discriminate by race when doing so, it better have a damn good reason, and I don't think Vermont has justified it.

I am also not quite sure what you mean by white people being the majority in Vermont and therefore...leaders would not discriminate against white people? Vermont leadership clearly did discriminate.

 

[Metaphor]

laughing dog made a claim that I was either a liar or a sloppy reader because I said it would be better to prioritise a 45 year old white person over a 19 year old BIPOC. I don't know why he thinks this statement is a lie. You'd have to ask him, because he has not been able to articulate why.

That is false. I did in post 88 and again in post 122.

I will articulate it for the 3rd time.
If you knew the age had been lowered to 40 when you wrote your response about 45 year olds, then you wrote a lie, because 45+ year olds were eligibile at the time of your response. Since I do not think you would not lie, it must be that you did not read your own link before you made that response.

You have offered this explanation for a third time, and it makes zero sense this time, as it made zero sense the previous two times.

You believe that the fact that:

45+ year olds were eligibile at the time of your response

is relevant to what I said. It is not relevant in any way. I did not make a claim about the eligibility of 45 year olds in Vermont at the time of the post. I did not make a claim that 45 year olds would never be eligible.

laughing dog, this ought to be embarrassing for you. The fact that nobody else has supported your claim that I wrote a lie shows that despite some of their partisanship camaraderie with you, other posters cannot bring themselves to defend your false accusation.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

population-based triage

google it...

also google scholar it...

 

[Toni]

Not when there is a large number of patients due to an accident, fire, or similar disaster.

In such cases, when there are a large number of urgent/potentially urgent cases, then yes, whoever is working triage will organize them as quickly as possible according to the urgency/potential life threatening need. It could be: whoever was in vehicle A or in Chem Room 207 or anyone under 15? Or Over 65 or with asthma or unconscious, etc.

The pandemic is an massive scale medical emergency. Massive numbers of patients need to be vaccinated. Even if we had sufficient doses to vaccinate everyone in every location globally in a well staffed, well supplied medical clinic, we would be unable to vaccinate everyone simultaneously and in order to avoid chaos, we'd have to set parameters that made sense. The parameters that various states set make sense to their health departments given their populations and various demographics within the state and how they have seen the disease progress over the course of the year or so before vaccines were widely available. They identified which groups had shown increased vulnerability to disease requiring hospitalization or death, and set priorities according to that data.

And as I've said about a hundred times now, the risk of age dwarfs the race risk by orders of magnitude. Not a single 19 year old without medical conditions should have been put ahead of a 45 year old without medical conditions. The eligibility of age cohorts should have been pushed forward instead of prioritising healthy BIPOC people.

EDIT: And, even if you did prioritise some non-white people, Asians should not have been included. Asians are either at the same or lower risk from COVID compared to white people. The only reason for their inclusion is the political category "BIPOC".

I forget. Where did you get your training as an epidemiologist? Public policy? Public health? Virology? Any background in any of those?

 

[Metaphor]

Not when there is a large number of patients due to an accident, fire, or similar disaster.

In such cases, when there are a large number of urgent/potentially urgent cases, then yes, whoever is working triage will organize them as quickly as possible according to the urgency/potential life threatening need. It could be: whoever was in vehicle A or in Chem Room 207 or anyone under 15? Or Over 65 or with asthma or unconscious, etc.

The pandemic is an massive scale medical emergency. Massive numbers of patients need to be vaccinated. Even if we had sufficient doses to vaccinate everyone in every location globally in a well staffed, well supplied medical clinic, we would be unable to vaccinate everyone simultaneously and in order to avoid chaos, we'd have to set parameters that made sense. The parameters that various states set make sense to their health departments given their populations and various demographics within the state and how they have seen the disease progress over the course of the year or so before vaccines were widely available. They identified which groups had shown increased vulnerability to disease requiring hospitalization or death, and set priorities according to that data.

And as I've said about a hundred times now, the risk of age dwarfs the race risk by orders of magnitude. Not a single 19 year old without medical conditions should have been put ahead of a 45 year old without medical conditions. The eligibility of age cohorts should have been pushed forward instead of prioritising healthy BIPOC people.

EDIT: And, even if you did prioritise some non-white people, Asians should not have been included. Asians are either at the same or lower risk from COVID compared to white people. The only reason for their inclusion is the political category "BIPOC".

I forget. Where did you get your training as an epidemiologist? Public policy? Public health? Virology? Any background in any of those?

I forget. Since when did a reverse appeal to authority constitute an argument?

 

[laughing dog]

You have offered this explanation for a third time, and it makes zero sense this time, as it made zero sense the previous two times.

No, it makes zero sense to you.

laughing dog, this ought to be embarrassing for you. The fact that nobody else has supported your claim that I wrote a lie shows that despite some of their partisanship camaraderie with you, other posters cannot bring themselves to defend your false accusation.

Since I did not make a claim that you wrote a lie, why would anyone support a claim I did not make?

I am embarrassed for you because of your increasingly pathetic and inept responses to me and others in this thread.

 

[Metaphor]

Since I did not make a claim that you wrote a lie, why would anyone support a claim I did not make?

You surely did. You wrote:

If you knew the age had been lowered to 40 when you wrote your response about 45 year olds, then you wrote a lie.

I did know Vermont had lowered the age to 40 at the time I wrote that post. So, you called me liar. But, in any case, it would not have made a difference whether I knew or not, because nothing in my statement made a claim about the eligibility of white 45 year olds at the time I was composing that particular post.

 

[laughing dog]

You surely did. You wrote:

If you knew the age had been lowered to 40 when you wrote your response about 45 year olds, then you wrote a lie.

I did know Vermont had lowered the age to 40 at the time I wrote that post. So, you called me liar.

You quote-mined and left out the part about that I did not believe you did lie. I believed you were sloppy.
I am pretty sure you truly believe what you wrote in the response above, but I do not believe it is true.

 

[Metaphor]

I am pretty sure you truly believe what you wrote in the response above, but I do not believe it is true.

A statement that makes no assertions about a vaccination schedule in Vermont at the time of utterance of the statement cannot be 'sloppy' about the vaccination schedule in Vermont at the time of utterance of the statement.

Nor was the statement, which was about the desirability of vaccinating 45 year olds over 19 year olds, a lie.

You made an error and you compounded your error. [removed]

 

[laughing dog]

I am pretty sure you truly believe what you wrote in the response above, but I do not believe it is true.

A statement that makes no assertions about a vaccination schedule in Vermont at the time of utterance of the statement cannot be 'sloppy' about the vaccination schedule in Vermont at the time of utterance of the statement.

Nor was the statement, which was about the desirability of vaccinating 45 year olds over 19 year olds, a lie.

You made an error and you compounded your error. [removed]

[removed]

 

[Toni]

I forget. Where did you get your training as an epidemiologist? Public policy? Public health? Virology? Any background in any of those?

I forget. Since when did a reverse appeal to authority constitute an argument?

I'm just trying to clarify. You seem to be asserting that you have greater expertise with how to manage mass distribution of limited vaccine to an entire population in a timely and orderly fashion. I was wondering if you had any relevant background.

 

[TomC]

EDIT: And, even if you did prioritise some non-white people, Asians should not have been included. Asians are either at the same or lower risk from COVID compared to white people. The only reason for their inclusion is the political category "BIPOC".

This is the sort of casual statistical analysis that makes people question your credentials.

For example, just how Asian does someone have to be to meet your criteria?
If somebody's Mom is a Chinese doctor and her dad is a white college professor, she'd qualify as Asian. Nevertheless, her socio-economic status would put her in a super low risk group.
Similarly, would a trans man qualify as male? You seem to think males should be prioritized due to a higher death rate.
And then there's the question of why men have a higher rate of death. If it's because men in the high priority categories, aged or infirm or BIPOC, die at much higher rates than similar women then the most at risk males are already in the high priority categories.

Personally, I'm inclined to assume that the health authorities are doing their best to make a speedy response to a crisis. A temporary crisis at that, as the supply of vaccine reaches the demand there won't be any more(imperfect) categorizing issues. Apparently, that will be by the end of the month.
Tom