Donald Trump erroneously declared at a weekend rally that public health officials were refusing the COVID-19 vaccine to whites for race.
The former president twisted the facts about public health policy and instilled a racial resentment in his remarks that exaggerated the effectiveness of racially-aware antiviral treatment guidelines in New York.
From his speech on Saturday night in Florence, Arizona:
Trump: “The left is now distributing life-saving treatments based on race and discriminating against and despising whites to determine who lives and who dies … Whites cannot be vaccinated. If you’re white, you can’t get a cure …. In New York, if you’re white, you have to go behind the line to stay healthy. “
Fact: No, whites are not excluded from the vaccine. Vaccines have an abundant supply. And, as a matter of public health policy, there is no evidence that they were sent “behind the line” for COVID-19 care.
Trump has distorted New York’s policy of allowing race to be one consideration when dispensing oral antiviral treatments with limited supply. This policy seeks to guide these treatments to those at highest risk of serious illness caused by the coronavirus.
Non-white or Hispanic people “should be considered a risk factor” because years of health and social inequality increase the likelihood that people of color will become seriously ill or die of the virus. I am saying.
Trump then extrapolated and erroneously claimed that whites were being pushed to the “front line” for health care and were locked out of both vaccines and treatments.
Michael Lanza, a spokesman for the New York City Health Department, told the New York Post that race was not used to deny treatment.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention discovered late last year that blacks, Hispanics and indigenous peoples were about twice as likely to die of COVID-19 as non-Hispanic whites, especially to be hospitalized. .. A previous Associated Press analysis of the first wave of the pandemic found that COVID-19 made a disproportionately heavy sacrifice to blacks and Hispanics.
According to a CDC survey in October, people in certain ethnic and racial minority groups died of COVID-19 at a young age, and reports from the facility on Friday show that minorities are more outpatient than whites. It is unlikely that you will receive antiviral treatment.
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Klepper reported from Providence, Rhode Island. Washington Associated Press author Jill Corbin contributed to this report.
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Editor’s Note — See the credibility of politicians’ claims.
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