How the CDC Voted to Kill Older White Americans, Citing Racial Vengeance as a Compelling Governmental Interest

 

The committee openly acknowledged that its initial plan [of vaccinating younger minorities who didn't need the vaccine] would result in more deaths than "vaccinating older adults first." 

But, the panel said, the plan would reduce racial disparities--something they deemed more important than saving lives--because essential workers, unlike adults over 65, are disproportionately black and Hispanic, the two groups that have borne the brunt of the pandemic. 

How did the committee reach that conclusion? 

According to meeting minutes, presentation slides, public statements, and even civil-rights directives, the now-scuttled plan didn't come out of thin air. Rather, it reflects the reductive, racialist worldview that is rapidly gaining ground in education, media, nonprofits, and now the U.S federal government--a worldview with concrete policy implications and concrete human costs. 

That policy agenda was seeded by outside consultants like Matthew, who told the New York Times that racial inequality "requires us to prioritize by race." But it was also seeded by the CDC itself, which in September hosted a series of trainings on "racism, sexism, and other systems of structured inequality," in direct violation of President Trump's executive order barring such programs from government agencies. 

And it was even seeded by the chairman of the CDC committee, Jos� Romero, who said in July that minorities "need to be moved to the forefront" of the vaccination line. The result was an explicitly race-conscious plan that would have prioritized shrinking the case gap between races over saving the most lives. 

This plan contained glaring double standards, such as an assumption that age-based policies would be discriminatory but that race-based ones wouldn't be. It relied on omission, distortion, and equivocation to make a highly contentious judgment seem self-evident, building bureaucratic consensus upon shaky foundations that were anything but apolitical or science-based. That consensus coalesced in September, when committee members met to discuss their framework for "vaccine equity and prioritization."

GRTWT.