As above, who said they’re an ID?
As I said, there’s a terribly broken syllogism here. Assumptions need to be re-examined if your conclusion is that vaccine cards are accepted as identification rather than merely evidence one has been vaccinated.
I’m OK with inconveniencing black people (or anyone) who refuses to get vaccinated. Because, as pointed out, the vaccine is so readily available that it’s only mental stuff that prevents people from getting it, not any actual logistical hurdle.
OK, but you specifically called out “black people”. Why should vaccination against a pandemic be inconvenient?
“Given”? Cite?
That’s “Latest Data on COVID-19 Vaccinations by Race/Ethnicity”, what we need is a report about the race/ethnic makeup of the UNvaccinated and preferably with their (self-reported) reason(s) for not getting the vaccine.
It could be, but the people passing the voter ID laws don’t want it to be. I’d be all for voter ID if the IDs were as easy to get as vaccinations are. But that defeats the purpose of the voter ID laws.
It would be if the goal was to get everyone a free ID. It’s not.
OK. I’m all for a hard to fake card that is free for everyone vaccinated. Something, like, say, a vaccine “passport”. Unfortunately there’s a lot of stupid people violently opposed to this idea.
I’m not sure the specific data exists in a format you prefer, or what you consider “latest,” but here’s some information from May:
I will add that I’ve seen more recent statistics on news coverage that reflect much the same.
That’s entirely possible. I probably should have been clearer. The point I was making was that the article was really the opposite of what we’re looking for. It was a study on people that had the vaccine. This thread is about people that haven’t had it.
Moderating:
As I cautioned @D_Anconia , please drop this hijack. All types of identification can be faked, it is illegal to fake them and it’s not the issue under discussion.
Not a warning, just guidance.
Yes, I understand. I think his link did contain some useful information – but it wasn’t in the format you hoped for.
Since I think that the issue under discussion is whether fewer people of color are getting vaccinated, I hope my link is more germane – but the information is not super recent.
What are vaccine passports being used for? I mean, I fully expect to provide vaccination status (I already did) for an international trip I’m hoping to take this fall. And a trip to Hawaii this Winter. But frankly, it isn’t exactly a hardship to expect someone who can afford a vacation in Hawaii, or concert or sporting event tickets, or a Broadway play, to be able to get themselves a free vaccine.
Poverty does disproportionately impact people of color. But that’s only going to make vaccine passports onerous for them if they are required for day to day activities. Most people living in poverty aren’t traveling and seeing concerts. Now, if we are requiring vaccine passports to go grocery shopping - yeh, that’s onerous. Bars and restaurants are in between.
Any incentive to vaccinate, including passports, will reduce the proportion of people who get severe COVID, including fatal COVID. That’s what I care about.
Since rural whites and African Americans have lower vaccination rates than my own demographic (white, somewhat above average income, living in an affluent neighborhood) widespread passport requirements would disproportionately help people who are poorer than I am, including many Black people.
As for the idea that passports could have a net negative affect on African Americans, this is only possible if the passports are a bad idea overall, or if — bad idea! — they are only required for activities very affluent people engage in.
When you have leftover money after buying necessities, everything is more convenient, including getting you and your kids vaccinated. I don’t see this a reason for public policies that will result in more people in poverty, of whatever race, dying.
He asked for a cite that African Americans and Hispanics have a lower vaccination rate. I provided one.
And everyone else is saying that they have given it a moment’s thought, and come up with all these different ways to make getting vaccinated as easy as it can be made.
If you think more needs to be done, then suggest something else that could be done, but stop acting like no one has even bothered to think about the problem.
…just watching this thread play-out is an exercise in extreme frustration.
Is the OP conflating two different things to make a political point? Yep.
Is the question will “vaccine passports end up being racially biased” a reasonable question to ask, and something that should be of concern to everyone here?
Yes it is.
The thing about being marginalised is that…you are marginalised. As in pushed into the margins. You don’t have the same opportunities, the same ability to get things done. Things are just harder.
The fact that we are even having this discussion shows how reactive the US strategy against Covid is. The vaccines were always a “Hail Mary.” The Christmas surge was devastating, and who knows how much worse it would have gotten if the vaccines weren’t around to stop thousands of people dying every day.
But then you started acting like you had won. The masks came off (both literally and figuratively) and you opened up again.
And now that the cases are starting to skyrocket once again you are looking for “easy solutions.”
Vaccine Passports are not that easy solution.
They will be most useful in getting international travel started again. It is likely that when New Zealand does begin to expand their travel bubbles that a Vaccine Passport will be required to bypass quarantine.
They would be least useful at the other end of the scale, like at the grocery stores. If you thought mask mandates were hard and dangerous to enforce, imagine what will happen when people have to “produce papers” in order to buy a bottle of milk.
It’s adding layers of bureaucracy onto what is ultimately a failure of vaccine rollout.
We can’t have this discussion without taking the time to listen to marginalised voices, and all of the activists that I follow have been rightly pointing the problems with passports. Just because the OP was making a political point it doesn’t mean everyone else has to do the same. Its a pandemic, and playing politics has already cost the lives of over 650,000 people in the US. Its a public health crisis that isn’t going to be solved by pointing fingers.
In a narrow way, yes, I suppose?
The question, as above is why would they end up this way.
Is it because we are making it harder for traditionally marginalized groups to get vaccinated (and hence have evidence of some sort they are indeed vaccinated)? That’s emphatically a no.
Is it because traditionally marginalized groups have built up a mistrust of vaccinations due to historical reasons? Yes.
Perhaps you are missing some nuance since it is a US (in this case) issue? The idea that we might actually enforce some kind of vaccine passport system in a systematic and widespread way and that it ends up being racially biased when the biggest bloc of unvaccinated are conservative white Americans blatantly ignores reality. And would never happen in the first because, again, the biggest bloc of the unvaccinated are not a marginalized group. You might see things like that in isolated cities (and good luck with enforcement there anyway) but it’s just not going to be a thing in the US in general.
As mentioned ad nauseum at this point, it really is coming down to a personal choice at this point.
Moderating: This is not a thread about voting. Stick to the OP.
…you suppose?
I just don’t get it. This really shouldn’t just be an “afterthought.” There should be modelling, studies, consultation with marginalised communities. I’ve gone back and reviewed the thread and there haven’t been any cites to anyone from black or poorer communities. Where is the engagement? The pilot programmes? The different proposals on how it will work? What venues will it apply too? Will this be Federally mandated or a State by State thing or a district by district thing or a town by town thing? Who enforces it?
Why are we starting with a conclusion when we don’t really know what the plan is?
That’s a mighty big conclusion here that demands a cite. Can you back that up with anything?
From the Washington Post:
The article was from June.
Your assertion ignores the historic ways black and marginalised communities have been treated by the US health system as recently as…today. Because it never ever stopped. You set up a system where they were not initially prioritised a vaccine slot, when the slots opened they were taken by white people. Sure, vaccines are more available now (in the US, not the rest of the world). But how is this being communicated to marginalised communities? The one that have no access to healthcare, the ones who do not trust the healthcare system?
And now you want to punish them? Deny them the right to go somewhere because of a fundamentally flawed racist process?
It’s not mistrust in the vaccines. A lot of it is mistrust and a lack of faith in the system. And a lot of it is the people in the heathcare systems lack of trust and lack of faith in black people.
And that distinction is important, because you can’t address either of these things by simply making vaccines widely available.
Perhaps you are missing some nuance because for the first year of the biggest worldwide public health crisis in a generation your country was governed by a bunch of conmen and grifter’s whose number one priority was making lots of money.
And in the second year some nicer people took over who have done a much better job but has made significant and damaging strategic mistakes.
And then you get the States who are led by a variety of people from the semi competent to the outright corrupt.
All of this hampered by a constant barrage of deliberate dis-information.
Perhaps…because you are in the middle of this absolute chaos storm of destruction, you are missing some of the nuance?
Because from where I am over in my little corner of the world I’ve been watching this all play out in abject horror.
The degree of confidence in which you state this is kinda offset by the fact that you feel the need for vaccine passports in the first place.
I have no faith in your assertion that I’m “blatantly ignoring reality.” Just because “biggest bloc of unvaccinated are conservative white Americans” doesn’t mean that black and marginalised people won’t be disproportionally disadvantaged by vaccine passports.
Do you know how I know this?
Because :: points around :: the entire history of America. In the Washington Post article I cited it showed how white Americans took vaccination slots from black Americans. We also saw how the police in New York ignored parks full of white people but cracked down hard on parks full of black people.
Conservative white Americans will figure out a way to game the system. They always have, and they probably always will. And to think that this won’t happen is to blatantly ignore reality.
Ah yes, America. The “land of the free, the home of the brave.” Where ultimately everything comes down to “personal choice.”
This has probably ultimately been the biggest failure of the pandemic response in America. You’ve summed it up quite perfectly here. Every person for themselves.
I’m going to talk about New Zealand for a minute…so apologies in advance.
But one of the cornerstones of why we have successfully eliminated Covid (and why we have been able to stamp out several community outbreaks) has been the public health messaging. The slogan we rallied around at the start of the pandemic was:
“Unite Against Covid.”
“Stay home, save lives.”
“Be kind.”
“Act like you have the virus.”
“The virus is the problem, not the people”.
In New Zealand we united against the virus. Covid-19 was the enemy that needed to be defeated, and it will take continued vigilence to keep the enemy at bay.
In America you are uniting against the unvaccinated. The enemy is within. You can see it here in the pit threads, in the Quarantine Zone.
Its all the fault of the unvaccinated people that you can’t “open up” properly yet. It’s their fault that the hospitals are starting to fill up again. A convenient scapegoat that allows you to ignore the many failures to control and mitigate the pandemic.
Its easy to point the finger. Its easy to ignore the corruption and the politicization and the outright incompetence and the racism and to put the blame on “that group of people” but that really misses the point.
In New Zealand we’ve been fortunate that we didn’t need to rush our vaccination process in order to save lives. Instead the vaccines went through our standard (but expedited) approval process, and schedule was prepared with the goal of getting everyone who wants to get vaccinated a vaccine by the end of the year. That schedule is here:
We are ahead of schedule and have been ahead pretty much since the beginning. And there is a real buzz, going around right now. Everyone I know wants a vaccine and are booking as soon as they become eligible.
And the thing is…we don’t want to get vaccinated to protect ourselves. We want to get it to protect each other. Our community. Our whanau.
Our incentive to get vaccinated is to protect each other. To unite against Covid.
The kid at the start of this video said it best:
“HEY COVID!!! You were a bit of an egg in 2020 eh?”
We’ve taken a lot of criticism in the last few months because of our alleged “slow rollout” of the vaccine. But lets be real here. Vaccinating an entire country in the middle of a global pandemic where demand is exceeding supply and where many countries are struggling to get vaccines was never going to happen overnight. Getting it done in a year isn’t a bad thing. It was never a race for us.
Vaccine passports are ultimately an unproven idea. I understand the theory. But I’m not convinced that enough work has been done to develop a system that is consistent and equitable and won’t require the creation of a brand new level of bureaucracy that is open to corruption, grifters, and over-policing of marginalised people that is all too common in the US.
Its just another “Hail Mary.”
Not moderating: What I don’t fully understand is why the level of mistrust of the medical establishment in the Black community is so deep that many will not get vaccinated even in the face of the fact that whites are getting vaccinated in large numbers. I know all about Tuskegee and all the other things (e.g. Blacks feel less pain, so we don’t give them as much pain killers), but can’t they see that this is different?