The Plague of the Poor

A dangerous COVID-era authoritarianism targets the most vulnerable—and threatens the foundation of democratic society
by Alex Gutentag

When President Joe Biden announced sweeping new vaccine mandates for 100 million Americans, he stated that these measures were necessary to “protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers.” But isn’t the vaccine itself supposed to be what protects the vaccinated? Not well enough, apparently. So whose interests are served by mandating a leaky vaccine that prevents neither infection nor transmission of a disease that is chiefly dangerous to people over 75 or with serious preexisting medical conditions?

“The unvaccinated” is a group defined more by class than by any other characteristic (perhaps besides age). Although the Biden administration has invested $10 billion toward expanding access to vaccines and building “vaccine confidence” in low-income areas, staunch resistance remains in many working-class and minority communities. In New York City for example, only 28% of the city’s Black residents aged 18 to 44 were vaccinated as of August 2021, when the city began paying residents $100 each to receive the vaccine. When that didn’t work, the city embraced a vaccine passport system that would exclude the majority of young Black New Yorkers from most indoor and civic activities, amounting to a de facto form of segregation.

During lockdowns, essential and frontline workers bore the brunt of COVID-19 cases while affluent professionals stayed home, teleworked, and ordered delivery. These workers were once called “heroes.” Now the Zoom class labels the same workers “anti-vaxxers” if they prefer to rely on the natural immunity many of them have already acquired from previous infections. While national news outlets repeatedly run stories of unvaccinated patients taking up too much space in ICUs, almost half of the COVID-19 cases in hospitals are mild or asymptomatic. Many hospitals are actually facing a severe nursing shortage because of vaccine mandates, and overcrowding in American hospitals is mainly a symptom of chronic downsizing and cuts. In 1975 there were 1.5 million hospital beds available in the United States; in 2019 there were only 920,000. To make matters worse, hospitals lost an estimated $50 billion a month during lockdowns in 2020.-- excerpt, rest at link above --