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I expressed my anger and still you replied; I appreciate that and will strive for a more even tone this exchange.
Perhaps you're right and I find the whole concept so odious that I am unable to extend charity that they deserve. I also think charity can be a trap when one extends it well past the point one should.
Age was by far the number one predictive factor in covid mortality; controlling for the most significant factor has some... questionable limits? I will extend enough charity to say that I'm saying this with years of hindsight instead of months, so perhaps Schmidt was merely misinformed.
I understand what you're saying about not focusing solely on age, and I agree other factors matter, but the way Schmidt and Lipsitch discuss it sticks in my craw.
The more I read back and rewrite this response, I am regretting introducing the metaphor because it's too one-dimensional, and the more I think about this the more it's the same old issue with intersectionality being nonfunctional. The "correct" matrix of ideal vaccine distribution would be horribly complicated and likely politically impossible.
Why should teachers be deprioritized for whiteness when they're going to be in high-risk environments, and spreading it to black kids who will then spread it to their higher-risk families? So one would assume given Lipsitch says most teachers are white. Excluding them is a strongly racist proposition if one is considering second and third order effects of vaccinations and spread.
It is a notoriously slippery phrase from a notoriously slippery ideology. It means everything and nothing, and no one knows how the equity eschaton would be immanentized.
So is the phrase just useless, an applause/boo light? As a writer I think one should pin down whatever they think it means, and let the chips fall where they may in the degree to which that does or does not match sources they may be citing.
I know what you mean but I would still like to clarify I don't believe in equity at all; I think the concept is far too slippery, a la "true communism has never been tried."
I do not trust people that claim to believe the boxes version to not, whenever convenient, turn to the machete. That is the fundamental assumption of ideas rooted in disparate impact: it doesn't matter how you get to the same outcomes. There is more than one way to skin a cat, more than one way to equalize heights and health outcomes.
Or less violently and more realistically, they resort to indifference. That is, Schmidt has built a career on the 'marginalized,' and that seems to displace concerns about "how do we save the most lives" and "maybe age is the number one factor in covid mortality." He has chosen populations he cares about, and populations to which he is indifferent.
Hmm. Action/inaction questions are such a sticky problem. While withholding vaccines from a particularly sensitive group because of their race isn't as actively making them more vulnerable as, say, sending sick people to nursing homes or infecting them all with an autoimmune disease, I am less than confident it's a valuable moral distinction in this case.
An actual woke believer will not choose the edited version of the cartoon, no. Mao thought the Great Leap Forward was a good thing, et cetera and so forth with history's other examples of horrors spawned by "good intentions."
This is a reasonable point! And indeed if you read Schmidt's paper his final recommendation is healthcare workers and essential workers who are likely to be exposed to and spread the disease to multiple people. While he discusses race as an impact his final recommendation doesn't actually suggest making the distribution race based directly at all.
Now part of that is because retail, grocery store workers and the like skew minority in the US in any case, but his final position in his paper does indeed seem to be there is no need to discriminate on race. I don't know whether the article only asked him about the race part or only used his answer for that part, but his papers recommendation does not suggest discriminating on race for vaccine distribution in the end.
Now having said that his recommendation turns out to be wrong anyway. There are 2 main vaccine pandemic responses 1) Vaccinate the most vulnerable (this directly reduces deaths) 2) Vaccinate the most likely people to spread the disease, workers who come into contact with many people. The 2nd saves lives indirectly by restricting spread even though you are primarily vaccinating people who individually are not at much risk of the disease.
However it has to be with a vaccine that is effective enough and taken up enough to get to herd immunity levels. Without that option 1) is generally your best shot. But Schmidt was making that recommendation before the vaccines were created so presumably we can't hold him responsible for the fact the vaccines were not as effective as option 2) requires, he didn't know that at the time.
I'm starting to feel like some Motte two-buttons meme: "who is worse, the journalist or the public health expert?" Just joking. Well. Maybe 50/50.
Now that the conversation has run its course, I'll say one last time how much I appreciate your patience and thoughtfulness. We don't always agree but I always enjoy our conversations here.
Likewise! And I appreciate you always trying to take the heat out of things, it's not easy. I've rewritten and deleted my own share of posts on things that are hot button topics for me, so I know it's not necessarily easy!
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