Opposition to vaccination passports comes from an unexpected quarter By Andrea Widburg
The Democrats, for much of the 20th century, represented the American working class. However, they built their latest political empire by targeting myriad special interest groups: Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQs, Muslims, Jews, the handicapped, etc., in addition to the reliable college-educated, White voters. Despite Democrats’ paeans to diversity, though, the coalition’s disparate members often dislike each other. That schism is showing as Blacks and Hispanics realize that the vaccine passports that White Democrats are urging damage their communities. Boston’s mayor, though, is pushing back.
It’s unquestionable that both Blacks and Hispanics have been resistant to the vaccine:
- “No, Black people, there is no white supremacist scheme behind the COVID vaccine”
- “CDC: Blacks and Hispanics still least likely to be vaccinated”
- “US Black and Latino communities often have low vaccination rates – but blaming vaccine hesitancy misses the mark”
- “Young Latino and Black people have the lowest rate of COVID-19 vaccination in L.A. County, new data show”
Given their consistent unwillingness to subject themselves to the vaccine, it will have a profound effect on Blacks and Hispanics that Democrat politicians and political bodies (mostly White), on the one hand, and corporations (mostly White-managed), on the other hand, are working together to demand vaccine passports to function in the modern world.
In New York, Bill de Blasio is requiring a vaccine passport for New Yorkers who want to eat inside restaurants (as opposed to on the street with the crazy homeless), attend performances, or go to the gym. Timothy Carney has rightly pointed out that this will create an illegal disparate impact:
Here’s where it gets hairy: There are great racial disparities in vaccination rates in New York City, which means there will be a hugely disparate impact from de Blasio’s rules.
More than 47% of white New Yorkers are vaccinated, according to Bloomberg’s tracker, compared to 33% of black New Yorkers and just under 45% of Hispanics in the city.
That means that black New Yorkers will be barred from public accommodations at a far higher rate than will white New Yorkers. This is kind of an awkward policy.
Non-governmental organizations – businesses and schools — are also demanding vaccines. To name just a few, Pfizer, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, and Google, as well as colleges across America (whose students are statistically at minimal risk from COVID), are all mandating vaccines. Employees who refuse can be fired says the EEOC. Again, this will disproportionately affect Blacks and Hispanics.
Likewise, the fact that the Biden administration is forcing troops to take the vaccine will disproportionately affect Blacks and Hispanics, who are disproportionately represented, relative to their numbers in the general population, in our armed forces.
Remember as you read all this that the vaccine does not prevent COVID and may even make people more vulnerable. For those who are vaccinated, the best that can now be hoped for is that, when they get COVID, the vaccine will lessen their symptoms and decrease their risk of death.
One Black politician, Boston’s acting Democrat mayor, Kim Janey, is pushing back against vaccine passports and the like. She doesn’t frame it in terms of liberty, because she’s a Democrat; instead, she analogizes it to slave papers. Fine, whatever. It needs to be said, and she’s saying it:
Boston’s acting Mayor Kim Janey likened vaccine passports to the papers that newly-freed slaves had to carry around after the civil war as she dismissed the idea of implementing them in her city.
Janey – who became the first black woman to serve as mayor in the city when her predecessor was tapped to be US Secretary of Labor earlier this year – made the comments on Tuesday after New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that indoor businesses will soon have to require customers to show proof of vaccination or otherwise turn them away.
Janey acknowledged the importance of encouraging people to get vaccinated against COVID-19 but said that requiring proof harkened back to a ’long history in this country of people needing to show their papers’.
‘Whether we’re talking about this from the standpoint of … during slavery, post-slavery, as recent as what our immigrant population has to go through here,’ Janey said.
Whether you look at forced vaccines and vaccine passports from the point of view of the government forcing people to wear yellow stars or pink triangles, from the point of view of slave papers, or from the constitutional viewpoint that says we Americans are a free people who cannot be bullied into injecting experimental drugs into our bodies, forced vaccines and vaccine passports are wrong, un-American, and extremely discriminatory. Mayor Janey is on the right track and it’s to be hoped that more people from the left follow her lead.
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