Pathologizing the Unvaccinated

Forget the Covid-19 pandemic. The top public health official in the United States has just announced that the real disease is people: specifically, the estimated 47 percent of the population that, for whatever reason, remains unvaccinated. 

"This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated," said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who nonetheless calls for the reopening of all public schools this fall despite the fact that children under the age of 12 are still not allowed to receive the shots. Does this mean that she also considers kids to be a disease?

Even if one were to dismiss Walensky's appalling statement as merely a poor choice of words, the fact remains that words do matter. Pathologizing minorities and oppressed groups of people is a hallmark of cruel, totalitarian regimes. The Nazis in Germany referred to Jews as viruses and vermin before eradicating six million of them in death camps. The Hutus called the Tutsis cockroaches before the Rwanda genocide. Closer to home, it was common and socially acceptable little more than a century ago to label native Americans and Black people as subhuman, the better to kill, displace, and enslave them. And only few years ago, in a pre-woke New York Times article about mass immigration from France to England, Muslim refugees fleeing from American forever-wars were likened to rats trying to force their way through tunnels. They were a "festering" problem migrating from "squalid" unsanitary camps in order, the reader might infer, to infest cleaner climes. Even after Yours Truly wrote a critical comment and the Times revised the piece, they still used the term "illegal migrants" to describe the refugees. They still called human beings illegal, thus dehumanizing them. And the liberal reader commentariat dutifully followed suit.

For his own part, President Biden is strategically accusing the data-thieving Facebook monopoly of "killing people" by allowing misinformation about the Covid vaccines to be published on its platform. This is at the very same time that the White House admits flagging posts it doesn't like so that Facebook, its erstwhile partner in oligarchic governance, can patriotically remove them. Censorship, even if for a putative "good cause," is still censorship. The suppression of Covid public discourse is just a gateway drug, leading to even more censorship. 

Now, about those 150 million-plus Americans who remain unvaccinated or only partly vaccinated. Contrary to liberal urban legend, they aren't all white anti-mask Red state Trump supporters thumbing their noses at Science just to be ornery.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Black and Hispanic people have consistently lower vaccination rates across all 50 states, leaving them at massively elevated risk for severe illness and death, especially with the emergence of the more contagious Delta variant. This is in keeping with the historical lack of health care services to these communities. It's also keeping with the structural racism now finally being acknowledged by the Newly Woke. The CDC's own  recommendations for more racial and ethnic equity as regards vaccine availability make Dr. Wolensky's characterization of the unvaccinated as a walking pandemic in their own right sound all the more cruel.

The CDC reports demographic characteristics, including race/ethnicity, of people receiving COVID-19 vaccinations at the national level. As of July 4, 2021, CDC reported that race/ethnicity was known for 58% of people who had received at least one dose of the vaccine. Among this group, nearly two thirds were White (59%), 9% were Black, 16% were Hispanic, 6% were Asian, 1% were American Indian or Alaska Native, and <1% were Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, while 8% reported multiple or other race. However, CDC data also show that recent vaccinations are reaching larger shares of Hispanic, Asian, and Black populations. Thirty-four percent of vaccines administered in the past 14 days have gone to Hispanic people, 6% to Asian people, and 12% to Black people These recent trends suggest a narrowing of racial gaps in vaccinations at the national level, particularly for Hispanic people, who have recently received a larger share of vaccinations compared to their share of the total population (34% vs. 17%).  While these data provide helpful insights at a national level, to date, CDC is not publicly reporting state-level data on the racial/ethnic composition of people vaccinated.

In California, for example, 29 percent of vaccinations have gone to Hispanic people, who account for 63 percent of cases, 48 percent of deaths and 40 percent of the population in the state. In New York, Black people have accounted for only 12 percent of vaccinations and 21 percent of Covid deaths.

Across the 40 states that provided racial and ethnic statistics, according to the KFF article, "the percent of White people who have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose (47%) was roughly 1.4 times higher than the rate for Black people (34%) and 1.2 times higher than the rate for Hispanic people (39%) as of July 6, 2021." (their bold.) As of July 6, less than half of Black and Hispanic people in the 40 reporting states had received even one dose of vaccine.

Shaming the unvaccinated or the inadequately vaccinated on social media or elsewhere will likely only make the politically-motivated holdouts all that more stubborn and more resentful than they already are when liberal "elites" lecture them and call them names.

Meanwhile, crushing poverty, the lack of transportation to get to a vaccine site, the inability to get time off from work, chronic health issues such as allergies, the logical assumption that previous infection with Covid grants them at least partial immunity are just some of the myriad reasons why millions of people have not gotten the shots.

Rather than shame or even pathologize the unvaccinated, as Dr. Walensky cluelessly has, why not give people the benefit of the doubt? Why not show a bit of empathy for a change? Why not ramp up community outreach, both at homes and workplaces? Why not just give people money rather than cut them off from their unemployment benefits and arbitrarily discontinue the national eviction moratorium?

As bad and irresponsible an actor that Facebook is, it is not, as Joe Biden claims, literally killing people. It's our profit-motivated, ever more consolidated health care "industry" and its structurally racist, classist, unequal delivery system that's literally killing people. Not for nothing do economists Anne Case and Angus Deacon (Deaths of Despair) call this industry "a cancer that has metastasized throughout the economy."

It should come as no surprise, then, that drug overdose deaths in the United States increased by 30 percent in 2020, the first pandemic year, making it the largest increase ever recorded

 Medicare For All might be cruelly off the table, and if you're poor you're bound to die a lot younger. But Uncle Joe wants you to know that the only thing you have to fear is Facebook disinformation and China beating America in the war for global oligarchic supremacy.

The Great White Rant

Not for the first time has Donald Trump dehumanized people by calling them "animals" during one of his habitual rants. Last month, it was alleged gang members. On Wednesday, it was the immigrants entering the country from Mexico, all for the lack of a magical wall to keep Whiteness safe.

 But this time he revved up his violent rhetoric to maximum overdrive:

 "We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — we’re stopping a lot of them,” Mr. Trump said in the Cabinet Room during an hourlong meeting that reporters were allowed to document. “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people, these are animals, and we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before.”

Well, not quite. Trump still hasn't deported as many people as his predecessor, who set the real record. That probably explains at least part of his spittle-inflected rage. He gets away with it, though, because Barack Obama was not one to brag about his own inhumanity. On the contrary, he herded them out of the country very quietly, to little outrage from his own party, no credit from the Republican Party, and nearly nonexistent coverage by the corporate media. When his administration was rarely confronted over his mass deportations, officials soothed it was only in order "to send a message" to future border crossers. 

And if outright deportation wasn't feasible, especially for those migrants claiming refugee status because of violence in their home countries, Obama's immigration bureaucrats did the proper public relations thing and locked them up in immigration jails, often euphemised as "family detention centers."

Trump, of course, is far from the first American official to dehumanize dark-skinned people. The US was founded upon slavery and the expulsion and extermination of the continent's native populations, the xenophobic language of which survives to this very day in military jargon and the naming of sports teams.

Along with tens of millions of other modern-day citizens, Trump became a true believer during the post-civil rights victory decades which featured the reactionary law-and-order regimes of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton herself was a true believer, touting the harsh sentencing reforms of her husband's administration by infamously calling young black men "super-predators who must be brought to heel," as though they were vicious dogs. That remark came back to haunt her during her latest ill-fated presidential bid.

But the autocratic Trump brings the institutional racism, long a part of the American fabric, to a whole new level. His diatribes act as much as a rebuke to "politically correct" liberals on behalf of his army of proud Deplorables as they are a reflection of his own bigotry.

From the New York Times: 

His harsh criticism came as American and Mexican officials were at a critical stage in their efforts to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Mr. Trump’s heated remarks on immigration, both private and public, appear to have resonated with his advisers, who have been moving to put in place ever-stricter policies in line with the president’s vision. Mr. Sessions said the Department of Justice would be adding immigration judges and prosecuting twice as many immigration cases this year.

“The president has made clear to all of us that we have to do better,” he said. “We are going to do better.”

My published comment on the article:

 With every hateful rant, Trump gives tacit permission to his base and all manner of disturbed individuals to act out their most violent fantasies. When you consider that, according to polls, at least a third of this country's citizens heartily approve of him, I think it's fair to conclude that this potential for violence is increasing exponentially with every passing day.

This applies both to state-sanctioned violence, as in the average of three people now getting killed daily by law enforcement, and the non-state sanctioned violence of people taking matters into their own hands, specifically their own hands gripping guns.

Not that our politicians seem to care. They're actually complicit. Trump doesn't seem like such an anomaly when the Senate has all but confirmed a known torturer and war criminal to head the CIA.

Trump refuses to feed any other belly besides the bloated one of the de facto oligarchy. The only thing he's interested in feeding to ordinary people is resentment.

Too many of us have become numbed to Trump's relentless bursts of projectile verbal vomitus. I don't know what's more noxious: calling immigrants "animals," his cruel demand to break up immigrant families, or his call for the prosecution of a democratically elected official acting to protect these same families.

This isn't a dog whistle to his fans: it's a bullhorn giving them permission to be brown-shirted vigilantes.

It's a very scary time to be alive.

And not just in America, of course. Witness SLOTUS (son-in-law of the United States) Jared Kushner's dehumanization of the Gaza Palestinians shot to death by Israeli snipers this week as mere propaganda tools who deserved to die by daring to venture too close to the barbed-wire fence of the world's largest open air prison.

Trump might be nothing but an ignorant con man riling up the base for the benefit of his own business empire. But Kushner, whose own relatives were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, should know better. Violent language aimed at rendering people less than human is historically the prelude to actual physical violence, ethnic cleansing and genocide. If nothing else, this language serves to terrorize entire populations for the crime of simply existing.