After cities across the country burned to the ground and countless businesses were looted and locked down for good, the same “anti-racist” movement bullying school districts into rewriting history and toppling statues of literal abolitionists is closing out this godforsaken year with a sort of declaration of war: killing grandma in the name of wokeness.
Less than a year after China unleashed the coronavirus on the world, Pfizer’s vaccine has hit markets worldwide, and the Moderna vaccine is about to join in on the fun. But after public officials crippled our finest economy in generations to protect the elderly from a pandemic significantly less deadly than the flu for young people, the elderly now are inexplicably being sidelined from getting the vaccine.
Well, not quite “inexplicably.” Evidently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is choosing to kill more people in the name of anti-racism, and the elderly are more white a population than the workers lucky enough to be deemed “essential” by our government overlords.
“To me, the issue of ethics is very significant, very important for this country and clearly favors the essential worker group because of the high proportion of minority, low-income, and low-education workers among essential workers,” Peter Szilagyi, a member of the CDC’s immunization committee, told the New York Times. Although Director Robert Redfield can take the unusual step of rejecting the independent committee’s ruling, all voting members of the body seem likely to rule in favor of prioritizing essential workers, even young and healthy ones, over the elderly in vaccine distribution, even knowing full well that such a choice would result in 2% to 6.5% more deaths.
In short, our ruling class decided that the risk of destroying millions of livelihoods, halting children’s rights to in-person education, and triggering an epidemic of domestic violence, substance abuse, and mental health crises was worth it to save grandma. But saving grandma isn’t worth failing to perform anti-racism.
The overwhelming majority of people who get the coronavirus will fully recover from it, but the virus is orders of magnitude more deadly for the elderly. As a point of comparison, children and younger teenagers have a risk of death from the virus 16 times lower than that of people aged 18 to 19. Seniors aged 65 to 74 years old have a risk of death 90 times higher than people aged 18 to 19, and those older than 85 have a 630 times higher death risk.
And yet, we are willing to risk tens of thousands of more deaths so a 25-year-old grocery clerk who has a 1-in-500 chance of dying from the virus can get the vaccine based on the color of her skin.
If that’s not stone-cold racism, then I don’t know what is.
If we’re willing to commit such evil vice-signaling at the cost of all the grandmas we were told we had to destroy an entire year to save, then reopen everything, and reopen it now. Get every child in the country back in school, and if the teachers don’t want to teach, fire them. Go take your 22 friends for $500 bottles of wine and tell grandma to eat cake. As long as it’s benefiting anyone but those too-white seniors, the expert class has decided that it’s worth it.
