Thanks To Trump, White People Overcame Privilege, Died Of COVID

They finally really did it. God damn them to hell.

In a devastatingly good story that you should go read now with this free gift link, the Washington Post reports on the mortality shift during the COVID-19 pandemic, using statistics and deep reporting to look at how racial disparities in coronavirus deaths evolved over time. Now, clearly, age is the one factor most connected to coronavirus deaths: More than 90 percent of COVID deaths have been among people over the age of 50, and those aged 75 and up account for the majority of all COVID deaths.

In the early months of the pandemic, it quickly became clear that in the non-elderly population, COVID was hitting communities of color especially hard, with Black people far more likely to die of COVID than white people, partly due to higher rates of health problems that put people at particular risk from the virus, and partly because of overall disparities in the availability of healthcare. The Post's analysis of CDC data, however, found that as the pandemic went on, that disparity began to disappear, and even to reverse:

At the start of the pandemic, Black people were more than three times as likely to die of covid as their White peers. But as 2020 progressed, the death rates narrowed — but not because fewer Black people were dying. White people began dying at increasingly unimaginable numbers, too, the Post analysis found.

By the summer of 2021, death rates were dropping as more and more Americans got vaccinated. But then the Delta variant began spreading, as did widespread political resistance to masks and vaccines. And the racial disparities in COVID deaths started disappearing:

The Post analysis found that Black deaths declined, while White deaths never eased, increasing slowly but steadily, until the mortality gap flipped. From the end of October through the end of December [2021], White people died at a higher rate than Black people did, The Post found.

That remained the case, apart from a brief period when Omicron emerged and started overwhelming healthcare infrastructure in the winter surge of 2021-22, causing higher death rates among Black patients, but once that surge ended, the disparity largely went the other way, as, once more, Black death rates fell below the rates among white people. As the Post explains, that seems almost entirely due to changes in behavior among Black and white Americans, particularly when you consider that overall racial disparities in American healthcare never went away.

“Usually, when we say a health disparity is disappearing, what we mean is that … the worse-off group is getting better,” said Tasleem Padamsee, an assistant professor at Ohio State University who researched vaccine use and was a member of the Ohio Department of Health’s work group on health equity. “We don’t usually mean that the group that had a systematic advantage got worse.”

That’s exactly what happened as the White death rate surpassed that for Black people, even though Black Americans routinely confront stress so corrosive it causes them to age quicker, become sicker and die younger.

The obvious explanation is that white Republicans decided not to get vaccinated or to wear masks, resulting in higher mortality, but the Post goes farther into the why of that: What drove so many people to make such self-destructive choices? The story notes that it's not even as simple as saying they automatically mimicked pandemic denier-in-chief Donald Trump at every turn — if they had, white Republicans would have run out to get vaccinated the few times Trump actually talked up the vaccines. Instead, the Post reminds us Trump "was booed after saying he had been vaccinated and boosted."

Tellingly, the story notes that according to the Ohio State research,

Black and White people were about equally reluctant to get the coronavirus vaccine when it first became available, but Black people overcame that hesitancy faster. They came to the realization sooner that vaccines were necessary to protect themselves and their communities, Padamsee said.

Honestly, it's tempting to blockquote large chunks of the story here, but instead we'll just remind you to hit the free guest link and read the entire analysis, which is thoughtful and nuanced and thorough, and to give you our quick takeaway from the whole thing: Deeply embedded cultural and social values, however much we may think of them as "personal," are at work here. The dominant White Protestant Ethic of individualism and individual rights is a really shitty tool to apply to a public health crisis, and that point just keeps coming up again and again throughout the story, as does the theme of who we think of when we think of "us" and "them."

Since I can't actually stick to that no-blockquotes vow, consider this discussion of how conservatives began thinking about public health as the pandemic progressed:

After it became clear that communities of color were being disproportionately affected, racial equity started to become the parlance of the pandemic, in words and deeds. As it did, vaccine access and acceptance within communities of color grew — and so did the belief among some White conservatives, who form the core of the Republican base, that vaccine requirements and mask mandates infringe on personal liberties.

I think also of the dishonest — but revealing — rhetoric people like Tucker Carlson pushed, insisting that masks and vaccines did little to control the spread of disease, but instead were all about liberal elites who "want to control you" through "fear," so the smart brave thing was to refuse to wear a mask or get vaccinated. Mind you, that's just another form of conformity, but one that connected righties to their own weird tribe, with the unfortunate side effect of giving the virus the chance to spread.

Add in racial politics and that individualism becomes deadly:

Researchers at the University of Georgia found that White people who assumed the pandemic had a disparate effect on communities of color — or were told that it did — had less fear of being infected with the coronavirus, were less likely to express empathy toward vulnerable populations and were less supportive of safety measures, according to an article in Social Science & Medicine.

Ask white conservative "individualists" to take measures that will protect them and other people, and they pretty quickly start assuming it's a zero-sum game, and damned if they'll do something that might benefit those people, as Jonathan Metzl and Derek Griffith discussed in their 2019 book  Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland  . The perception that government-funded programs like Obamacare would help the wrong people filtered directly into how Black and white people talked about their own healthcare, even:

“Black men described precisely the same medical and economic stressors as did White men and detailed the same struggles to stay healthy,” Metzl wrote. “But Black men consistently differed from White men in how they conceived of government intervention and group identity. Whereas White men jumped unthinkingly to assumptions about ‘them,’ Black men frequently answered questions about health and health systems through the language of ‘us.’ ”

Metzl told the Post in an interview that the same kind of thinking tainted discussions of COVID, too. In some cases, the parallels are depressingly obvious:

As Metzl conducted research for his book in 2016, a 41-year-old uninsured Tennessean named Trevor who was jaundiced and in liver failure told him “I would rather die” than sign up for the ACA. When asked why, Trevor, who was identified by first name only, said: “We don’t need any more government in our lives. And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.”

Now during the pandemic, there are people like 39-year-old Chad Carswell of North Carolina whose kidneys functioned recently at just 3 percent. He was denied a new kidney in January after refusing to take a coronavirus vaccine as required for the transplant at the time, saying: “I was born free. I’ll die free.”

Unfortunately, since nobody has figured out how to break through all that white conservative distrust of science and government, the story is short on solutions. That matters a hell of a lot, because of course it's not just white MAGA folks being infected — they keep spreading the virus, endangering us all.

Could it really be as simple as publicizing this story and telling white wingnuts that Black people are now enjoying better health outcomes? Maybe we could add that George Soros wants to keep the vaccines from Republicans and Fox viewers?

[ WaPo (gift link) / Dying of Whiteness (Wonkette gets a cut) / Meme: All over the web, original image by Daniel Lobo, Creative Commons License 2.0 ]

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