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Comment by tango-unchained | Hacker News Reader

> Professionals have long leaned pretty liberal

I'm sorry, but I think today's partisan politics are clouding your memory. There's been multiple points in history where poltically left leaning professionals were systematically kicked out of their jobs and blacklisted from their careers.

> berate the white ones for not being vaccinated, and then ignore the lack of vaccination among the non-white ones.

People around me are being given like $100 and a pat on the back when they get vaccinated around here. Antivaxxers are idiots, but people getting vaccinated are having the gold carpet rolled out to them.

Also it doesn't look good to repeat a racist fox news soundbite that's already been debunked about how the blacks are invading our cities and spreading covid [1].

[1] https://abc7chicago.com/dan-patrick-texas-lt-governor-blames...

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> Also it doesn't look good to repeat a racist fox news soundbite that's already been debunked about how the blacks are invading our cities and spreading covid [1].

This is a strawman argument. The OP proposed that on average whites are more vaccinated than blacks, which your citation supports. So vaccine marketing should target the biggest vaccine skeptics, otherwise the racially inequal outcomes will only grow.

A) White people, like black people are not homogenous, so certain white groups could benefit from being targeted

B) There are more white people in America than black people. So, while in relative terms there may be less vaccinated black than white people, in absolute terms, there are more unvaccinated white than black people.

The vaccines don't care about the proportion of various demographic groups. The community benefits from there being more vaccinated people overall.

> The vaccines don't care about the proportion of various demographic groups. The community benefits from there being more vaccinated people overall.

Careful, you might pull something with those mental gymnastics.

You’re right that more vaccinated people is what matters so everyone should do their part. That means per capita should be the same across all demographics. Any group that has a lower per capita is dragging covid progress, regardless of how large or small the group is.

You ignore my previous point about the fact large segments of the white population also being vaccine hesitant. The problem is more obvious with black people because the demographic information collected during vaccinations doesn't generally include things like voting intentions, strength of religious faith, profession, understanding of who won the last election, or opinion on what caused the twin towers to collapse.

However, if you look at the cross tabs of opinion polling, supporters of a particular party are much more hesitant to get the vaccine.

> There's been multiple points in history where poltically left leaning professionals were systematically kicked out of their jobs and blacklisted from their careers.

Well, communists right? Literal sympathizers with the US' greatest geopolitical foe?

> Also it doesn't look good to repeat a racist fox news [blah blah blah fox news..]

Wait are the vaccination rates between whites and blacks actually substantially equal? And your link is just playing the trick of swapping out percentages for absolute numbers to make a tendentious argument.

See Figure 3: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-...

Vaccination rates for whites is 10-15 points higher than for Black people in blue states, but about the same in the poorest and most rural states.

That’s my point—what you’re looking at is low vaccination rates among disadvantaged groups. Public health officials have just forgotten that non-college rural whites are one of those groups.

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