No evidence that
The Times checks Trump’s lies at that “rally” in Arizona.
“The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating, white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine, or if you’re white, you don’t get therapeutics.”
False. There is no evidence that white Americans are being denied access to vaccines or treatments.
Mr. Trump referred to a Wall Street Journal opinion column criticizing New York State’s guidelines on two limited antiviral treatments that ask health providers to prioritize the therapies for immunocompromised patients and those with risk factors. The guidelines, which were released in late December, said, “Nonwhite race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor, as longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from Covid-19.”
Well let’s have a little compassion for Trump here. He’s got a very simple mind, and a very empty one, so he can’t be expected to grasp the difference between prioritizing people with extra risk factors and shutting out people without extra risk factors.
State officials have defended their guidelines by citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which show that Black, Hispanic and Native Americans are about twice as likely to die from Covid-19 than white Americans. A spokeswoman for New York State’s Department of Health told Fox News that race did not disqualify patients from treatment but that the guidelines instead considered race as one risk factor.
What? Huh? I don’t understand. Coverup! Lies! Hillary! Female narcissism! Borderline Personality Disorder!
“Why did Nancy Pelosi and the Capitol Police reject the more than 10,000 National Guard troops or soldiers that I authorized to help control the enormous crowd that I knew was coming?”
False. There is no evidence that Mr. Trump ever made a request for 10,000 National Guard troops or that Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected such a demand. The speaker of the House does not control the National Guard.
He did make it. The fact that he was alone in a bathroom at the time and made it to the mirror is neither here nor there.
There’s also one about fraudulent ballots in Arizona. Also false.
Buses and trucks are more frequent in the neighborhoods where minorities live. Intentional, or not, it’s the areas with lower property values that are closer to industrial zones, warehouses zones and the like. In Phoenix it was proven that the diesel buses cause a higher incidence of childhood asthma, which is a co-morbidity of Covid-19 and there is a push to replace those with electric buses.
It’s a logical triage, not far from his rally.
We have several electric routes in Seattle – the earliest ones, with the lowest route numbers. (I live on the 2, and sometimes take the 1 which is just down the hill a bit.) I wish we had more, but instead it’s been all about the underground.
For some reason, my mind read “ballots” as “bats”. I was struggling to figure out what a fraudulent bat would be like (a bird identifying as a bat, maybe?), and why Trump would care.
Well, being a Republican is likely an extra risk factor for covid…
Re: #2 – I was going to mention that Seattle is a very walkable city, but then I recalled when I was climbing the hills in Queen Anne, I was taking advantage of the fact that I was in good shape for climbing hills when I was there.
It’s hard to believe that anyone takes Trump seriously on factual matters at all. There he was, in Maricopa County, where a months-long “recount” and bamboo strand search led to zero fraud detected, and he still claimed fraud in Arizona. Fraud in voting is like Oakland. There’s no “there” there.
(They still haven’t found anything in Wisconsin for the millions that the Republicans are billing to taxpayers for a recount.)
Seattle is both walkable and not so walkable. On the not so side, the hills are indeed one factor, not just because of the extra energy required but also because in many places they’re so steep they’ve been left as green belts, so you have to go way out of your way to go up or down them. Another is that the distances can be hella large – the city is about 20 miles north to south, and I think 10 to 15 miles east to west. On the walkable side, there’s so much to see that one is motivated to walk a lot.
People other than Trump *have* found issue with using race as a factor to ration COVID drugs:
https://blog.simplejustice.us/2022/01/03/will-covid-break-the-equal-protection-clause/
It seems to me that people in the USA get even more worked up about any issue involving race than the rest of us. Possibly with good reason. On the one hand you have people who are literally the descendants of slaves and who have largely been kept at the bottom of the socio-economic heap since emancipation by every means possible – both legal and illegal. Attempts at reform and change have been fought bitterly and often successfully. On the other hand there are people whose forebears benefitted directly or indirectly from slavery and who even to this day activity buy into the view that BIPOC people are inferior and/or dangerous to them. As current events are showing, those with a high degree of racial animus against BIPOC are a decent plurality of the population.
I’m sure a lot of those racists (that is what they are) would much rather forget all about US history and it’s lasting scars. That is after all what many of the current batch of laws supposedly targeting CRT are all about, along with literal book burnings in some areas. This hyper-sensitivity to race now leads to cries of reverse racism about any attempt to redress wrongs or, in the case of the likes of Scott Greenfield, and wonderfully comfortable view that the law must be scrupulously neutral in it’s application now, because it was wrong that it wasn’t so before.
It’s a nonsense of course. You can’t correct an imbalance without some tipping of the scales and you don’t treat everyone the same regardless of need when prioritising resource.
It’s not like I don’t have a dog in this fight either. New Zealand was a British colony. All my political life (since about 15) I have been very very aware of the debate as to whether, in what way, and by how much, Maori should be compensated for the breach of the Treaty of Waitangi and the consequences arising from those breaches. Frankly, after 40 years we’re still barely getting past the low hanging fruit. We still have to address how to deal with the effect of embedded systemic racism in our legal, political, educational, health and social institutions. Those against compensating Maori or redressing the balance are picking up on rhetoric and techniques used in the USA on pretty much a weekly basis. Thankfully even our conservative politicians aren’t as far down the road generally as the GOP. Some may even be decent human beings.
There has been a lot of fuss though about vaccination programmes targeting Maori. Maori vaccination rates are climbing, but have badly lagged those for pretty much every other group. The reasons are many and varied, but as our outbreaks have shown, a community is only as safe from the pandemic as it’s most vulnerable population. One targeted vaccination programme sent eligible people a code to present on arrival. Within hours an group concerned about reverse racism was spreading the code far and wide. The programme organisers shrugged their shoulders and vaccinated anyone who turned up – their point being that any vaccination was good. Point is that targeted programmes and resources have lifted Maori vaccination rates above where they were. Similar programmes in other areas of health and education designed to improve outcomes for Maori have also helped to some degree, but nothing has ever actually balanced the books.
I think legal scholars like Greenfield and Volokh are wrong to insist on a granular level of legal neutrality on this issue for the simple reason that to use ‘other factors’ requires diversion of resource at all system levels into designing, testing, and administering a complex and multi-variate analysis to be applied to each individual presenting. Necessary information may be lacking, requirements and understanding may be confused and in all likelihood the level of questioning will be both confusing, humiliating and act as a barrier to seeking treatment. Further, as I understand it treatment is not being rationed. it’s being prioritised. It’s an important distinction. Pliny the in between did surgery on those who needed it, not those who were healthy. I don’t need treatment for diabetes, but someone else does. An upper class white family in Christchurch doesn’t need vaccination against Hepatitis C, but a Maori family in the Bay of Plenty does. We regulate and prioritise all the time according to crude classes of need. The fuss here is in bad faith at worst and from a position of academic comfort at best.