“Since when does America give anything good to black people first?” Black Lives Matter leader Hawk Newsome, 44, told the New York Times in explaining his decision to go unvaxxed — ironically flipping Mayor Bill de Blasio’s determination to prioritize minority areas for the jabs into grounds for suspicion.
The paper was looking at why just 28 percent of black New Yorkers ages 18 to 44 have gotten jabbed. And Newsome stood for the many who feared “they could not trust the government with their health.”
That has some basis in history: The Tuskegee experiment, notably, involved the government intentionally not treating syphilis cases among 600 blacks in 1932 to observe the disease’s progress over the next four decades.
But it’s pretty sad that so many of our fellow citizens would worry that the feds could still behave that way — let alone get away with it. And BLM and its enablers have fed that paranoia by leaving Americans massively confused about how many blacks are shot by police across the country each year. (It’s several dozen, not the thousand or more that many of us now guesstimate.)
Then again, the Biden Food and Drug Administration also fed fear by briefly suspending approval of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine (as we warned at the time): Since the one-shot J&J jab had been prioritized for distribution in pop-up clinics in predominantly black areas, the suspension boosted suspicions of Uncle Sam experimenting on African Americans again.
Of course, black communities are by no means the only ones rife with vax resistance. And all of them have their reasons — including, universally, the FDA’s unconscionable failure to give a final OK for the jabs.
Meanwhile, the cultural elite fixate on reluctance among Trump voters as if that were the main problem, perhaps because it’s easiest to blame the “deplorables” yet again. It’s so much easier to despise dissenters.
Resist the urge to hold the unvaxxed in contempt, and keep reasoning with them. What they need to hear are the clear facts: More than 60 percent of the country has had at least one jab, and over half is fully vaccinated. That’s 200 million Americans: If any side effects had shown up, the media would be blaring it. And the unjabbed make up 99-plus percent of serious COVID cases, even with Delta rampant.
Getting angry with the unvaxxed only gets in the way of letting reality sink in.