A neo-religious approach to COVID vaccine distribution

 

The great theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg once wrote that “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.”

 

As the new ‘anti-racist’ movement increasingly become more religion-like, the ramifications of Weinberg’s insight begins to manifest – and in the worst way possible, on how the COVID-19 vaccine should be distributed in the US.

 

From the outset of the pandemic, proponents of the new ‘anti-racism’ movement, who cannot examine any issue except through the racial lens, have suggested that disproportionate rates of illness and deaths in minority racial groups as a consequence of COVID-19 are due to racism.

 

But as Christopher Hitchens remarked, exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence. Not only do the race-hustlers not provide exceptional evidence for their theory of everything, they ignore mountains of evidence to the contrary, as is evident with the claims that police in the US disproportionately shoot and kill black people.

 

Here again, in relation to COVID-19, the dogma of racism is not only put forward as a theory, but used by well-meaning and important people in their calculus on how best to distribute life-saving vaccines.

 

The data suggest that the elderly are by far the most vulnerable to COVID-19, with a Nature study suggesting that the mortality risk for those under the age of 50 being less than that of the seasonal flu. Indeed, the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) records, as of December 16, show that 221,480 out of the total 276,061 deaths in the US involving COVID-19, or over 80%, are in those aged 65 or above, who make up only 16% of the US population. In the UK, data from the Office of National Statistics show that the median and the mean ages of those who died due to COVID is above 80 (83 and 80.4 respectively). The average life expectancy in the UK is only 79.4 for men and 83.1 for women as of 2019.

 

However, the CDC has recently released guidelines regarding vaccination putting those in the vulnerable age bracket behind in the queue. One of the reasons, according to a CDC report, is that the over-65 population in the US is the whitest population by race, and hence, according to its ethical principle to ‘Promote justice’ and ‘Mitigate health inequities’, they should be less prioritised. Hence, the essential worker category—transit workers, supermarket employees, public servants—which contain more ethnic minorities, should be prioritised above the most vulnerable.

 

From the CDC's report - see bottom right panel 

Without even pointing to the WHO Value Framework, which states that to reduce deaths should be the chief priority, or the line in the Hippocratic Oath about 'therapeutic nihilism', most of us would instinctively feel that this is an amoral approach. The notion of filial piety is a virtue throughout the world and across time, from ancient Confucian Asia to classical Rome. Even today, who would doubt that millions of young people would volunteer to give their vaccines to their grandparents if that’s the choice? And as to the racial element, the callousness and naked prejudice speaks for itself.

 

But even putting morality aside, simple statistics would suggest that just because the proportion of minorities is higher numerically in the essential worker group, given the vastly disproportionate mortality risk of the virus to the elderly, this policy would sacrifice tens of thousands of the millions of elderly minorities that otherwise could be saved by the vaccine. Hence the policy, amoral and illogical, would fail even at its own supposed purpose of saving ethnic lives.

 

More frustratingly perhaps is that data shows the whole notion of racism being at the roots of ‘health inequities’ regarding COVID-19 is tenuous at best.

 

For example, in the UK, a report found that of all the deaths of doctors involving COVID-19, 94% were ethnic minorities. The sample all being doctors reduces the likelihood that there are great differences in socioeconomic status, health knowledge or access to medical care. The vast discrepancy is much more likely due to differences in vitamin-D levels, which has increasingly been shown to strongly correlate with COVID-19 illness severity and risk of death. 

Levels of 30ng/ml is considered healthy by the Endocrine Society

 

Vitamin-D is made by the skin upon UVB excitation, and people with darker skin tones, evolved to live in places with high UV, are less able to make vitamin-D in less sunny places such as the UK or much of the US, especially in the modern urban lifestyle where most of the daytime is spent indoors.

 

A 2019 study found that a third of adults in the UK are vitamin-D deficient, with incidence multiple times higher in Asian or black people compared to white people. In the US, a study found more than 40% of adults were vitamin-D deficient, with the highest rates in the black (82.1%) and the Hispanic (69.2%) peoples. So instead of performing ham-handed social engineering reminiscent of the Progressive eugenicists in California less than a century ago, the CDC might do better to advocate people to take inexpensive and very safe vitamin-D supplement, as experts in the field have suggested as early as August.

 

Additionally, a recent Lancet study has found that while black and Hispanic people in New York are more likely to catch the virus, they are less likely than whites to have critical illness or die after hospitalization. The most important factor is likely the fact that the black and Hispanic populations are younger than the white population in the US, as was the sample that was studied, where those aged 65 or more made up more than 40% of white patients, but only around 20% for the black and Hispanic patient groups. This points again to age being the chief factor when it comes to saving lives from COVID-19, above vitamin-D, above race, and above politics.

 

Lucretius wrote in his De Rerum Natura, “To such heights of evil are men driven by religion.” This new religion, where racism is the Original Sin, has poisoned even scientists, who will act irrationally to placate the new god of the Woke, in the name of niceness, and against evidence. This is a perfect illustration that history can move backwards, contra what the ‘Progressives’ claim. Resist it while you can.