Vermont prioritises BIPOC over white people for COVID-19 vaccine

[Bomb#20]

Only BIPOCS. StraightPOCS and GayPOCS are not included. This is discrimination. But I am against ALL racial discrimination, Including discrimination against White people.

Eldarion Lathria

So you don't believe in triage in medical care?

Why, do you?

Triage is something triage nurses do on an individual case-by-case basis. They examine a patient's specific injuries and symptoms and make a three-way determination that the case is so severe that death is near-certain regardless of treatment, or that the case is so mild that survival is near-certain regardless of treatment, or that the case is somewhere in the middle and death is likely without treatment but survival is likely with treatment. They prioritize patients with the third characteristic: the ones care will do the most good for.

You are advocating that the government decide an individual characteristic -- how much good the vaccine will do someone -- not by examining his medical condition but by examining his ethnicity. That's not triage. That's racial profiling. If there's statistically an ethnic imbalance in the prevalence of some type of crime, do you also favor the government deciding how likely someone is to have committed that crime by examining his ethnicity?

 

[Bomb#20]

BUT I wonder why wasn't this an issue over age with all the old people getting vaccinated first? ... No one was screaming about senior citizens, "See, I told you they were taking over!!!11!1 And the Democrats are helping them!"

Well, the obvious psychological explanation is that people who are discriminated against for being young can look forward to being discriminated in favor of when they become old, so the general practice of age discrimination doesn't strike people as intrinsically stacked against them.

Is it a constitutional principle or not??? If it is an actual Constitutional principle and Vermont's policy is racially discriminatory, then whatever that principle is applies to age discrimination as well. ... Discrimination on the basis of age, race, creed, etc would still be discrimination even IF the root cause of health disparities were monkeys flying out of people's butts. ...
IF it is really illegal discrimination, you can't make an exception for one category but not another.

That's not actually how 14th Amendment jurisprudence works. The SCOTUS has never taken an equal-means-equal and discrimination-is-discrimination view of the matter. It has three levels of "scrutiny" it applies -- basically, just how good a reason does the government need to have in order to be allowed to get away with a certain type of discrimination. "Strict scrutiny" is for racial, religious, and national-origin discrimination. "Intermediate scrutiny" is for sex discrimination. "Rational-basis scrutiny" is for everything else.

And since it would be age discrimination then if it were race discrimination now, why the gynormous reaction now but not before?

The public are already used to it. The government discriminates by age all the time. It's allowed to.

 

[Bomb#20]

This is why BIPOC are prioritized: ...

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

Well, that after all is the point of the whole "BIPOC" concept. "BI" are already considered "POC", so it's pure redundancy to say "BIPOC", unless you want to express the view that the "POC" who aren't "BI" shouldn't really count as "POC" quite as much as "BI" people count.

 

[Bomb#20]

I would expect this to get to the courts and struck down, unless Vermont government officials in charge of this realize quickly enough that it is not winnable.

Vaccine supplies are expanding and states keep making more and more people eligible. If anybody sues over this, most likely by the time the case makes it to trial the rules will have changed, the plaintiff will be eligible, and the court will declare the case moot.

 

[untermensche]

Seeing that Vermont is probably around 95% white (looked it up, 93%), this isn’t a bad idea at at all.

What is the deal with all the bed wetting by some people? They root around for news like this like a pig for truffles. They find a story on their White Rage news aggregator and start pissing their pants and snorting.

Oh, I have to share this with everyone! This’ll prove white people really are the victims here.

There is a huge right-wing propaganda machine in the US spewing out these insane distortions and crying points.

The right has given up honest discourse.

It's all lies all the time.

What is called the left (corporate Democrats) is just lies most of the time.

The only truth tellers around are people like AOC and Bernie.

And in the insane world of lies and a population that cannot tell truth from lies they are marginalized with lies.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

I would expect this to get to the courts and struck down, unless Vermont government officials in charge of this realize quickly enough that it is not winnable.

Vaccine supplies are expanding and states keep making more and more people eligible. If anybody sues over this, most likely by the time the case makes it to trial the rules will have changed, the plaintiff will be eligible, and the court will declare the case moot.

I see, thanks.

Maybe if a person is not eligible due to race and later gets not-too-mild COVID, they have a shot if they sue for compensation on the basis that without the unconstitutional discrimination, there was a significant chance of getting the vaccine earlier? Or is that too difficult?

 

[untermensche]

Nothing unconstitutional abut medical experts saying who should be vaccinated first.

This is a bunch of hand waving about nothing.

The right-wing caused this thing to get out of control by listening to Trump.

They have no more say in anything.

 

[Trausti]

Nothing unconstitutional abut medical experts saying who should be vaccinated first.

So if they concluded that straight White guys should go first, you'd be okay with that?

 

[Bomb#20]

Maybe if a person is not eligible due to race and later gets not-too-mild COVID, they have a shot if they sue for compensation on the basis that without the unconstitutional discrimination, there was a significant chance of getting the vaccine earlier? Or is that too difficult?

Beats me. A plaintiff is liable to run up against "Sovereign Immunity". Case law on that is inconsistent and I'm not a lawyer.

 

[Trausti]

Maybe if a person is not eligible due to race and later gets not-too-mild COVID, they have a shot if they sue for compensation on the basis that without the unconstitutional discrimination, there was a significant chance of getting the vaccine earlier? Or is that too difficult?

Beats me. A plaintiff is liable to run up against "Sovereign Immunity". Case law on that is inconsistent and I'm not a lawyer.

No, no. A Sec 1983, or civil rights, action permits suits against the government (federal and state) for constitutional violations. Just need to show that the government or government actor violated a known right. The prohibition against discrimination by race would be an obvious one. Even if the damages are nominal, the carrot is that the plaintiff's attorney gets his fees. That's what usually drives the case.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Well, this should be easy to test your theory. Just which middle aged people very recently got serious covid because they were not vaccinated and they can sue. There should be these middle aged people everywhere, like 42 year olds etc who were not in the first round of senior citizens. Every state should have them.

Sue and see what happens.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

Well, this should be easy to test your theory. Just which middle aged people very recently got serious covid because they were not vaccinated and they can sue. There should be these middle aged people everywhere, like 42 year olds etc who were not in the first round of senior citizens. Every state should have them.

Sue and see what happens.

That is not what I had in mind, i.e., they would not need to show that they got serious covid because they were not vaccinated. Rather, what they would have to show is that they got serious covid and did not get vaccinated due to racial discrimination. Then the argument goes that without that discrimination, there is a significant chance (that's epistemic probability) that they would have gotten the vaccine earlier and that that would have prevented serious covid. The causal link need not be established conclusively, only that it might be that way, so the compensation would also be based on the probability of harm due to the unconstitutional action.

I have no idea whether that would work, though. Maybe the Sovereign Immunity B20 mentioned would be used to reject the claim. Or something else.

 

[untermensche]

Nothing unconstitutional abut medical experts saying who should be vaccinated first.

So if they concluded that straight White guys should go first, you'd be okay with that?

Of course. But that isn't the case.

Live with it.

 

[Toni]

https://www.apmresearchlab.org/covid/deaths-by-race

* Includes all available data from Washington, D.C., and the 50 states. Users are cautioned that the Indigenous rate is calculated from just 43 states reporting Indigenous deaths, and the Pacific Islander rate from just 22 states reporting such deaths. States employ varying collection methods regarding ethnicity data. Denominator is built from data aggregated from each state, aligned with their method. Users are cautioned that states do not uniformly report Indigenous, Pacific Islander and other deaths, and many of these deaths are represented in "Other" race

 

[TomC]

Nothing unconstitutional abut medical experts saying who should be vaccinated first.

So if they concluded that straight White guys should go first, you'd be okay with that?

I would.

I'm assuming that the health authorities are trying to prioritize the highest risk groups, while on the way to enough vaccinated folks to start providing the protection of herd immunity.

In other words, start at the beginning and work your way towards the goal as efficiently as possible.

I don't think that concept would be difficult to grasp if there weren't so many people, like you and the OP, looking for ideological straws to grasp. Ways to whine about how straight white males are really the one's being discriminated against.

That's what I see.

Tom

 

[Emily Lake]

Caveat: I just skipped like five pages of this thread.

Met - the inclusion of ethnicity in this triage list is a reflection of ethnic minorities in general having lower access to health care and being lower income. These are populations that have materially lower levels of health treatment. The reasons for that are complicated and multifaceted. Some of it is due to racially differential treatment practices in medicine, some of it is due to poverty and income, and some of it is due to cultural variances in how medicine is approached (particularly with first nations).

Bear in mind that the first priority included first responders and senior citizens - and that the age effect that was noted early in this thread is largely coming from the difference in impact between senior aged males and senior aged females. For younger and middle-aged people, the variance in outcomes between males and females is very small.

An additional consideration is that the prioritization here is extremely unlikely to result in discriminatory treatment toward white people. Even if it sounds like it on paper... the actual effect of this really ends up being to encourage BIPOC people to actually get in earlier. I would be willing to bet that if you tracked the actual vaccination patterns, you'd still end up seeing BIPOC people getting vaccinated at a lower rate than white people, and getting vaccinated later in the season. The prioritization doesn't do much more than marginally shift the timing for those people.

 

[laughing dog]

Caveat: I just skipped like five pages of this thread.

Met - the inclusion of ethnicity in this triage list is a reflection of ethnic minorities in general having lower access to health care and being lower income. These are populations that have materially lower levels of health treatment. The reasons for that are complicated and multifaceted. Some of it is due to racially differential treatment practices in medicine, some of it is due to poverty and income, and some of it is due to cultural variances in how medicine is approached (particularly with first nations).

Bear in mind that the first priority included first responders and senior citizens - and that the age effect that was noted early in this thread is largely coming from the difference in impact between senior aged males and senior aged females. For younger and middle-aged people, the variance in outcomes between males and females is very small.

An additional consideration is that the prioritization here is extremely unlikely to result in discriminatory treatment toward white people. Even if it sounds like it on paper... the actual effect of this really ends up being to encourage BIPOC people to actually get in earlier. I would be willing to bet that if you tracked the actual vaccination patterns, you'd still end up seeing BIPOC people getting vaccinated at a lower rate than white people, and getting vaccinated later in the season. The prioritization doesn't do much more than marginally shift the timing for those people.

But without this outrageous race-based prioritization, there vaccination rate for BIPOC people would be lower and there'd be more sick and dead BIPOCs and fewer sick and dead white people!!! Don'cha get it? It is part of the war against white people.

 

[Trausti]

Nothing unconstitutional abut medical experts saying who should be vaccinated first.

So if they concluded that straight White guys should go first, you'd be okay with that?

I would.

I'm assuming that the health authorities are trying to prioritize the highest risk groups, while on the way to enough vaccinated folks to start providing the protection of herd immunity.

In other words, start at the beginning and work your way towards the goal as efficiently as possible.

I don't think that concept would be difficult to grasp if there weren't so many people, like you and the OP, looking for ideological straws to grasp. Ways to whine about how straight white males are really the one's being discriminated against.

That's what I see.

Tom

Once you establish a precedent that government may discriminate based upon on race, then government will discriminate based on race.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Once you establish a precedent that government may discriminate based upon on raceage, then government will discriminate based on raceage.

FIFY.

Why are you obsessed with the blacks taking over?

 

[TomC]

Once you establish a precedent that government may discriminate based upon on race, then government will discriminate based on race.

I was born in 1958.
Over the course of my lifetime I've found exactly the opposite.

The government and society used to do that, quite unapologetically. But things have changed hugely over time.

I think you're full of crap. Health officials are attempting to get the Trump Virus under control as best as they are able. Once the highest risk groups are vaccinated, and vaccine production matches vaccine demand, there will be no reason to go on choosing who to prioritize. I expect that to be early summer.
Tom