It has nothing to do with a vaccine for the corona virus, it has everything to do with making it simple to trace vaccine delivery and ensure standardized record keeping. It’s a very simple and clever approach and could be huge in the fight against polio and other diseases.
It sounds to me very much like Melinda Gates isn’t a politician or anyone used to measuring their words for media consumption.
A better way for her to have said it would have been something like “After health care workers, the next priority group for a vaccine would be other at-risk groups, such as nursing home residents, essential workers, and yes, black people and other people of color, since their socioeconomic situation means that they’re both exposed more, and less able to sustain the disruption that would come with a COVID-19 infection.”
But she didn’t say all that other stuff, even though that’s almost certainly what she was getting at.
Right, which is why I wouldn’t say it’s ‘offensive’, just comes off weirdly. It’s a disparate racial effect type thing. If, as I believe you should, you prioritize getting the vaccine to groups and areas where the diseases is hitting hardest, that’s going to tend to come out as non-whites getting it sooner on average, in the US. Actually screening by skin color to give it to low risk people of a certain color before high risk people of another color would be unacceptable IMO no matter what the colors. But maybe she didn’t mean that, and she isn’t in charge of it anyway.
As to the suggestion she means giving the vaccine to African Americans first to see if it’s harmful, which didn’t occur to me originally but seems the theme of some posts, that would seem to be excluded by her saying front line health workers should get it first of anyone. Clearly the assumption is that safety has been established first.
Black people in the US have higher rates of diabetes and high blood pressure. Those are due to socio-economic factors. They also have higher rates of sickle-cell anemia, and that’s world-over. All those things are co-morbidities that make them more likely to die of COVID-19 if they happen to catch it. The fact that they tend, in the US, to have less in savings, and need to work at something, usually putting themselves at greater risk, is a factor in their catching it in the first place.
Poverty in Africa makes people especially vulnerable, although I’m not sure whether Melinda Gates was talking about Black people world over, or just in the US, but world over, there is less access to clean water for washing, and washing food and clothes. Being undernourished, and on the brink of a vitamin-deficiency disease, or protein deficiency puts you at greater risk of dying if you catch the virus. Poverty which makes all sorts of conditions we regard as minor annoyances, rather major health threats, because of lack of access to proper treatment-- like allergies and mild asthma can be terrible problems. because sometimes alternatives to allergens-- like latex gloves-- aren’t available.
So, yeah, Mrs. Gates is correct; albeit, the second population after healthcare workers should probably be people who are over 65, *of any *race, particularly those in substandard housing. Then, anyone who cares for an elderly person, in a personal service.
After that would be the next set of vulnerable populations: people under 60 with co-morbidities. Black people might be over- represented in the group, but if the stat included any white people, or biracial people, so it goes,
It is also possible that there may be some hereditary factors that are endemic in black people, such as sickle cell disease. In any case, while it may be difficult to sort out exactly why African Americans appear to be much more susceptible to Covid than whites, there is no question that they are. So prioritizing them as a unit makes sense.
