The Bogus Story About Vaccine Racism

The woke crowd has unsurprisingly turned to its favorite hobgoblin of "structural racism" (i.e. this piece in Journal of the American Medical Association) as explanatory for differing rates of COVID-19 vaccine uptake. Per recent polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Hispanics (61%) and blacks (55%) say they have either already gotten a COVID vaccine or plan to do so as soon as possible. The big problem the "structural racism" argument has is this reticence is more or less mirrored in historical data for influenza vaccines. Blacks (by about 15%) and Hispanics (~13%) lag white vaccination rates considerably for the most vulnerable age group (69.9% for ≥ 65 years). Otherwise there is a lag, sometimes quite noticeable, other times not so much, but the idea that COVID vaccine reticence is somehow driven by systemic racism fails to heed the historic story.