This should be pretty simple: A crippling global pandemic has attenuated our economic and social lives, and that’s not great. The logic for preserving those restrictions in perpetuity will dissolve when a certain number of Americans have the antibodies necessary to prevent a tidal wave of infections that could overwhelm hospital systems. That number is the threshold for “herd immunity,” functionally putting the pandemic to an end. And the faster we get there, the better.
And yet, there is a teeming subculture that seems to believe the series of medical miracles that could bring an abrupt end to the pandemic isn’t an unalloyed public good. For these people, the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines must observe the demographic hierarchies with which social-justice advocates concern themselves. Herd immunity is desirable, of course, but not if the wrong people get us there.
In New York, for example, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has wielded COVID vaccines as an instrument to combat the “forces of inequity.” Those forces are, apparently, arrayed against the distribution of these shots in poorer and minority-dominated neighborhoods. Therefore, public officials are doing all they can to ensure that access to the vaccine in these neighborhoods is uninterrupted. But there is a problem of scarcity amid the near-universal demand for these vaccines. And so, consumers, who are desperate to be inoculated, are not waiting for the supply to come to them. That has become a source of frustration for those who want to balance the goal of ending the pandemic along with the objective of meting out karmic retribution against the white and wealthy.
The fact that “so many white people” are migrating to neighborhoods like New York City’s Washington Heights to get vaccinated is “bad news,” according to Dr. Susana Bejar, who was favorably quoted in a report in “The City.” These concerns are not entirely ideological. Hispanic and black New Yorkers have higher rates of COVID-19 infections, and they make up a larger proportion of hospitalizations and deaths. But it seems self-evident that the risk of infection among minority populations is mitigated as much by their own inoculation as the inoculation of everyone else around them. Obsessing over who gets a life-saving vaccine first doesn’t seem productive if the directive is to vaccinate everyone.
But that egalitarian outlook is not shared by many in the press. “Although low-income communities of color have been hit hardest by Covid-19,” the New York Times reported on Tuesday, “health officials in many cities say that people from wealthier, largely white neighborhoods have been flooding vaccination appointment systems and taking an outsized share of the limited supply.” The Times reports that the bureaucratic obstacles placed before would-be vaccine recipients, which were designed to privilege “people in underserved neighborhoods,” have actually made it harder for these residents to get immunized. The challenge is compounded by well-documented vaccine “skepticism” in communities of color.
The Times report notes that the phenomenon isn’t limited to New York City. It’s being observed all over the country, where whiter and wealthier Americans are migrating into minority neighborhoods for their chance at a jab. But “fixing the problem” is “tricky,” because “singling out neighborhoods for priority access could invite lawsuits alleging race preference.” And those lawsuits would be entirely legitimate because what is being expressed by lawmakers is quite plainly race preference. What is most confounding here is the notion that enthusiastic demand for a COVID vaccine is a “problem” at all.
The threat to the health-care system represented by COVID-19 is a matter of volume. The disease’s communicability and its relatively high mortality rate threatened to overwhelm hospitals, and drastic measures—including the varying degrees of lockdown that still persist throughout the country—were necessary to mitigate that threat. When any one person is fully immunized, though, that’s one less person who represents a transmission vector and a hazard for local hospitals. Getting as many people vaccinated in the shortest span of time is not just one social good among many—it is the paramount objective for policymakers, who should be thinking about their constituents’ psychological and economic health and their physical wellness.
Brandishing this vaccine as a weapon in an ongoing crusade to achieve retributive historical justice isn’t just counterproductive—it actively harms the interests of the very people these social engineers think they’re helping. Eliminating the structural obstacles in the way of access to lifesaving care is a noble objective, but not if that pursuit needlessly perpetuates a deadly pandemic. No one should be frustrated by the fact that “the wrong people” are getting the vaccine when everyone needs it sooner rather than later. This outlook is, to be frank, insane. But insanity is not an uncommon feature of our current political discourse.
