Vermont prioritises BIPOC over white people for COVID-19 vaccine

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

The additional risk of being BIPOC was given. Compare it to the age risk.

This appears to have been a decision that was made mid-stream where the government looked at the numbers and saw a BIPOC gap in vaccination. So not only was the decision based on the narrow risk of mere infection survival but also in addressing the gap and lag. Therefore, you are narrowly defining risk in terms of infection survival and not including the additional risks from all the lag of not getting the vaccine, nor the impact of community-specific lag on other members of the community. So, for example, you are comparing age group N for race 1 and race 2, but the lag of BIPOC means the brunt are being vaccinated much later than when the age bracket opens, so you ought to be comparing white age group N versus BIPOC age group M+N, which we do not quite know or at least has not been computed. You haven't yet even proved your case with your narrow risk but you also need to broaden risk because risk is bigger than you imagined.

The community-specific lag is irrelevant to the issue under discussion.

Saying it is irrelevant does not make it so. Observing there is lag and then trying to respond to the lag is reasonable.

The change put people at 2.4x the baseline risk at the same priority as those at 11x the baseline risk even before considering whether it was socioeconomic rather than racial in the first place.

You have yet to prove those numbers, but again you are defining risk narrowly without considering other factors such as interactivity of one person to the next, the community, the distrust by minorities of a govt medicine program, and the LAG.

The goal of the vaccination program is to reach R0 or higher, not merely in one region or amongst one people but pretty uniformly distributed against geography and sub-geography and demographics which tend to cluster together. If you do not do that, then the virus stays alive in hosts, spreads, and mutates, creating future opportunity to undo the vaccination effectiveness. You can't have one minority lag way behind because ethnicities tend to spend a lot of time together, clustering and spreading, just like whites by themselves tend to do the same thing. This is a fact of just having extended families and neighborhoods somewhat segregated. You let one race not reach anywhere near R0, you're fucked. Eventually. Now, in addition, having younger African Americans get the shot be around the older ones who did NOT get the shot also decreases the chances the older ones will get sick in the first place. And giving the younger ones opportunity to get the shot increases the chances they will take their older relatives at the same time period to get the shot. So clearly, there are some less computable side effects that are beneficial. But that's all not even counting the FACT of lag. Sure, in theory, it sounds reasonable that one group gets vaccinated at the same time as another, but IN PRACTICE, it just doesn't happen that way for whatever reason. You announce, "hey minorities can get vaccinated now," and the minorities will lag behind in scheduling on average. So IN PRACTICE, you are comparing the wrong age groups across race.

When all is said and done, we will look back on this and get statistics. The hard-to-compute effects of the policies will be somewhat hard to prove, but we will find Vermont did very well relative to other states with their vaccination program. We will find lower relative death rates for both Whites and BIPOC as compared to other states.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

This effect of the prioritizing BIPOCs, 2% of the population of a very small state, (which shouldn't even be a state according to some here who deny Washington DC statehood because they have such a low population even though it is larger than Vermont and Wyoming), resulting in the deaths of a handful of white people is totally dwarfed by the number of white people who died and who continue to die because they watch Fox News.

Definitely. The effect of Vermont's racism will be small. That doesn't mean it isn't racism, though. Do we overlook it because there are other wrongs in the world?

Ya know, for all your arguing that correlation is not causation when it comes to race and class issues, you sure do seem willing to assign causation to correlation when it comes to public health issues.

I was listening to an All Things Considered report earlier tonight that said vaccination rates are lagging while illness and death rates are elevated in Amish communities. Suppose Vermont made vaccinating Amish teenagers the same priority as vaccinating BIPOC teens. Would you then be arguing that Vermont was engaging in religious discrimination?

It's misguided.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The community-specific lag is irrelevant to the issue under discussion.

Saying it is irrelevant does not make it so. Observing there is lag and then trying to respond to the lag is reasonable.

The change put people at 2.4x the baseline risk at the same priority as those at 11x the baseline risk even before considering whether it was socioeconomic rather than racial in the first place.

You have yet to prove those numbers, but again you are defining risk narrowly without considering other factors such as interactivity of one person to the next, the community, the distrust by minorities of a govt medicine program, and the LAG.

I'm not the one who put forth the 2.4x.

The goal of the vaccination program is to reach R0 or higher, not merely in one region or amongst one people but pretty uniformly distributed against geography and sub-geography and demographics which tend to cluster together.

The objective is to minimize the death toll. In the long run that means vaccinate everyone that will accept it, but before that's reached you're better off vaccinating those at the highest total risk of dying (innate risk * chance of exposure.)

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Saying it is irrelevant does not make it so. Observing there is lag and then trying to respond to the lag is reasonable.



You have yet to prove those numbers, but again you are defining risk narrowly without considering other factors such as interactivity of one person to the next, the community, the distrust by minorities of a govt medicine program, and the LAG.

I'm not the one who put forth the 2.4x.

The goal of the vaccination program is to reach R0 or higher, not merely in one region or amongst one people but pretty uniformly distributed against geography and sub-geography and demographics which tend to cluster together.

The objective is to minimize the death toll. In the long run that means vaccinate everyone that will accept it, but before that's reached you're better off vaccinating those at the highest total risk of dying (innate risk * chance of exposure.)

Logical fallacy. Fallacy of division. Also, you are ignoring the lag.

 

[SimpleDon]

This effect of the prioritizing BIPOCs, 2% of the population of a very small state, (which shouldn't even be a state according to some here who deny Washington DC statehood because they have such a low population even though it is larger than Vermont and Wyoming), resulting in the deaths of a handful of white people is totally dwarfed by the number of white people who died and who continue to die because they watch Fox News.

Definitely. The effect of Vermont's racism will be small. That doesn't mean it isn't racism, though. Do we overlook it because there are other wrongs in the world?

Yes, of course, we overlook it. Not because there are other wrongs in the world, but because of what we are trying to do, to vaccinate our way out of this pandemic.

Do you think that we should ignore the BIPOCs' failure to be more widely vaccinated because they have less access to health care? Because you consider it to be inverse or reverse racism?

It is a public health imperative that we will not all be safe until the population is at herd immunity, the estimates are in the 70% to 90% range for COVID-19. Thanks to Fox News and Trump conservatives and liberal anti-vaccers we wouldn't have anywhere close to these percentages of white people in this country to this level of immunity from vaccinations and who have had the disease. Libertarianism kills people. If some weird religious cult, say the Hasidic Judaism, (I don't know if this is true) doesn't accept the idea of vaccination, are you going to oppose extra efforts to vaccinate them as being bigotry against more mainstream religions? edit: Actish asks you the same thing in a more coherent way. But you ignored the question from him. Please answer one of us.

As long as we believe that race is a real thing that we base actions on, why wouldn't we have to do these things, that you label as racism?

 

[untermensche]

Vermont is a very beautiful State.

I believe it was Jesus who said the last shall be first.

What a truly Christian gesture.

 

[SimpleDon]

In California, Humboldt County saw a serious drop off in people showing up for vaccination appointments, to the point that they defrosted one thousand doses that they couldn't put into the arms of people. They called San Francisco, and Humboldt Co. offered the defrosted vaccines to them. San Francisco accepted, and they picked up the defrosted vaccine and put them in the San Francisco General site, which services the population of the City that is the under-represented who are vaccinated, i.e., the BIPOCs and the homeless.

Lacking the hair-trigger response of some here to the least offense against white people, it seems completely escaped the attention of San Francisco that they were taking vaccines meant for white people and putting them in the arms of BIPOCs. The very crime of racism that got Vermont into trouble in this thread because white people will die to save BIPOCs!! Humboldt County is 87% white. San Francisco is barely one-half white, 51%.

The tale is here in all of its racial ignoring prose.. But beware, San Francisco Chronicle is a liberal newspaper in that it doesn't makeup stories to fit a political agenda, like Fox News et al. See my previous post about Fox News being responsible for the deaths of many more white people than Vermont since they spread and amplified the lies about the pandemic. All without hardly any mention on these pages.

 

[Metaphor]

Lacking the hair-trigger response of some here to the least offense against white people, it seems completely escaped the attention of San Francisco that they were taking vaccines meant for white people and putting them in the arms of BIPOCs.

You mean: they took a vaccine originally earmarked for a particular geographical area and used it for another geographical area, and they did it because the vaccine would otherwise have gone to waste. What a horror show!

The very crime of racism that got Vermont into trouble in this thread because white people will die to save BIPOCs!! Humboldt County is 87% white. San Francisco is barely one-half white, 51%.

Vermont had a policy that explicitly discriminated by race. California's policy doesn't, unless you are suggesting that when the clinic was set up in SF, they turned away the white people who lived in that area.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I'm not the one who put forth the 2.4x.



The objective is to minimize the death toll. In the long run that means vaccinate everyone that will accept it, but before that's reached you're better off vaccinating those at the highest total risk of dying (innate risk * chance of exposure.)

Logical fallacy. Fallacy of division. Also, you are ignoring the lag.

Argument not detected.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

This effect of the prioritizing BIPOCs, 2% of the population of a very small state, (which shouldn't even be a state according to some here who deny Washington DC statehood because they have such a low population even though it is larger than Vermont and Wyoming), resulting in the deaths of a handful of white people is totally dwarfed by the number of white people who died and who continue to die because they watch Fox News.

Definitely. The effect of Vermont's racism will be small. That doesn't mean it isn't racism, though. Do we overlook it because there are other wrongs in the world?

Yes, of course, we overlook it. Not because there are other wrongs in the world, but because of what we are trying to do, to vaccinate our way out of this pandemic.

Do you think that we should ignore the BIPOCs' failure to be more widely vaccinated because they have less access to health care? Because you consider it to be inverse or reverse racism?

Once again, the standard fallacy of affirmative action shows up: The idea that you can balance a negative against one person with a positive against somebody else of the same group.

We should be encouraging BIPOCs to get vaccinated. However, vaccinating lower-risk BIPOCs does absolutely nothing about the issue of higher BIPOCs not getting vaccinated.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

In California, Humboldt County saw a serious drop off in people showing up for vaccination appointments, to the point that they defrosted one thousand doses that they couldn't put into the arms of people. They called San Francisco, and Humboldt Co. offered the defrosted vaccines to them. San Francisco accepted, and they picked up the defrosted vaccine and put them in the San Francisco General site, which services the population of the City that is the under-represented who are vaccinated, i.e., the BIPOCs and the homeless.

Lacking the hair-trigger response of some here to the least offense against white people, it seems completely escaped the attention of San Francisco that they were taking vaccines meant for white people and putting them in the arms of BIPOCs. The very crime of racism that got Vermont into trouble in this thread because white people will die to save BIPOCs!! Humboldt County is 87% white. San Francisco is barely one-half white, 51%.

The tale is here in all of its racial ignoring prose.. But beware, San Francisco Chronicle is a liberal newspaper in that it doesn't makeup stories to fit a political agenda, like Fox News et al. See my previous post about Fox News being responsible for the deaths of many more white people than Vermont since they spread and amplified the lies about the pandemic. All without hardly any mention on these pages.

The handling of waste shots should be very different than the handling of eligibility. Get waste shots in whatever arms you can find.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

I'm not the one who put forth the 2.4x.



The objective is to minimize the death toll. In the long run that means vaccinate everyone that will accept it, but before that's reached you're better off vaccinating those at the highest total risk of dying (innate risk * chance of exposure.)

Logical fallacy. Fallacy of division. Also, you are ignoring the lag.

Argument not detected.

The argument has already been presented. The government's goal is to achieve R0 and to try to do that in as many sub-communities as possible as well. You are assuming this means that they are minimizing the death rate in the short term amongst Whites but actually they want to maximize vaccinations in each community in order to minimize death rates in the long term. You also keep assuming that you need to compare the same age group across races but in practice that is not how people are getting vaccinated since BIPOC has lag in vaccinations which means a comparison of an older group of BIPOC against a younger group of Whites is warranted. Moreover, there are so many complex things going on here that the best way to analyze how well Vermont has done is to analyze the numbers after vaccinations are over, rather than making ideological or fallacious assumptions as you have.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

So once again the government has decided to do medical experiments on minorities.

 

[TomC]

So once again the government has decided to do medical experiments on minorities.

That's remarkably obtuse.

The government is trying to reach herd immunity through vaccination. So we can go back to normal lives and get the economy going and all that.
Where did you come up with the notion of "experiments on minorities"?
Tom

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Argument not detected.

The argument has already been presented. The government's goal is to achieve R0 and to try to do that in as many sub-communities as possible as well. You are assuming this means that they are minimizing the death rate in the short term amongst Whites but actually they want to maximize vaccinations in each community in order to minimize death rates in the long term. You also keep assuming that you need to compare the same age group across races but in practice that is not how people are getting vaccinated since BIPOC has lag in vaccinations which means a comparison of an older group of BIPOC against a younger group of Whites is warranted. Moreover, there are so many complex things going on here that the best way to analyze how well Vermont has done is to analyze the numbers after vaccinations are over, rather than making ideological or fallacious assumptions as you have.

You minimize the death rate by putting each shot into the highest risk arm available. Of course a perfect measurement of risk is not possible but Vermont allowed racial motivations to override medical ones.

Your problem here is a fixation on "group". That's the standard justification for discrimination in the name of anti-discrimination.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So once again the government has decided to do medical experiments on minorities.

Huh? There's no medical experimenting involved here.

 

[ronburgundy]

This is why BIPOC are prioritized:

View attachment 32638

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/201.../hospitalization-death-by-race-ethnicity.html

So, on that basis, Asians should be de-prioritised from the other BIPOC.

According to this link:
https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2020/20_0247.htm

the death rate from COVID-19 was 2.4x higher in men than in women, which is as high as the BIPOC (excluding Asian) compared to white people.

Would you support Vermont adding men over 16 as a priority group, based on morbidity data?

Men don't live in segregated communities where there odds of exposure to the virus is much higher than women, but minorities do. In addition, minorities are more likely to work in service industry and jobs where distancing is impossible or more difficult, and to have to take public transportation.
So, if the goal is to reduce the spread rather than protect the feelings of right wing snowflakes, then it makes perfect sense to prioritize minorities but not men. There aren't enough Asian to make a difference worth complicating the rule. Almost 90% of non-whites are part of the groups with higher spread.

 

[Metaphor]

Men don't live in segregated communities where there odds of exposure to the virus is much higher than women, but minorities do. In addition, minorities are more likely to work in service industry and jobs where distancing is impossible or more difficult, and to have to take public transportation.

Okay: even if I accepted the claims you are making here, it doesn't make the case you think it does. Men die at a higher rate than women despite these 'extra' risk factors you attribute to BIPOC over white people.

So, if the goal is to reduce the spread rather than protect the feelings of right wing snowflakes, then it makes perfect sense to prioritize minorities but not men.

You haven't made the case, except to people who already agreed with you.

There aren't enough Asian to make a difference worth complicating the rule.

I don't know what this means. The rule would simply be 'black and indigenous households'.

Almost 90% of non-whites are part of the groups with higher spread.

This is a meaningless 'statistic' that does not compare non-whites to whites, nor compares men to women.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Men don't live in segregated communities where there odds of exposure to the virus is much higher than women, but minorities do. In addition, minorities are more likely to work in service industry and jobs where distancing is impossible or more difficult, and to have to take public transportation.
So, if the goal is to reduce the spread rather than protect the feelings of right wing snowflakes, then it makes perfect sense to prioritize minorities but not men. There aren't enough Asian to make a difference worth complicating the rule. Almost 90% of non-whites are part of the groups with higher spread.

As usual, race is a proxy here.

It makes sense to do what we did here and prioritize service industry workers. Get the real issue, not the proxy!

 

[SimpleDon]

Lacking the hair-trigger response of some here to the least offense against white people, it seems completely escaped the attention of San Francisco that they were taking vaccines meant for white people and putting them in the arms of BIPOCs.

You mean: they took a vaccine originally earmarked for a particular geographical area and used it for another geographical area. They did it because the vaccine would otherwise have gone to waste. What a horror show!

The very crime of racism got Vermont into trouble in this thread because white people will die to save BIPOCs!! Humboldt County is 87% white. San Francisco is barely one-half white, 51%.

Vermont had a policy that explicitly discriminated by race. California's policy doesn't unless you suggest that when the clinic was set up in SF, they turned away the white people who lived in that area.

So the Vermont policy intends to kill white people and not the results of the policy that triggers your finely tuned racial sensibilities?

In both cases, the inoculation centers are set up by geographical areas to serve the underserved population. You provided no evidence that whites were turned away from Vermont inoculation centers.

Vermont now has opened its efforts to all people 16+ years old. So they are now killing older people of all races equally now, according to your perspective.

I don't put any stock in the concept of race as a biological determining factor in any question of society. This is certainly a result of how I was raised by by the most politically conservative parents anyone could have but who weren't racists. As a result, I depend on this forum to set me straight on thinking that I struggle to understand.

So it is the intent and not the results that count. So the intent of the new voter suppression laws in Georgia is to prevent the widespread voter fraud that didn't happen while the result that they will suppress the votes of a segment of the population doesn't matter? Have I got this right now?