If you thought something as non-controversial as distributing a vaccine during a pandemic would be free from woke politics, think again. The New York Times is out with a new piece quoting multiple “experts” who have decided that the prioritization of precipitants should depend on one’s race. In saner times, this would be considered blatantly racist, but it’s 2020, so as long as you are bagging on old white people, it’s all good.

Later in the piece another doctor, named Marc Lipsitch, explains that teachers should not be considered essential workers for the purpose of being given priority vaccines by the CDC because, and I quote, "they are often very white." pic.twitter.com/FIiEvy6kLD

— Jason Compson (@JCompson_III) December 18, 2020

So to sum up, in this single article by @JanHoffmanNYT, three experts–Schdmit, Lipsitch, and Gould– say that more white people dying will "level the playing field", teachers are "too white" to deserve a vaccine, but that their "Black and Brown" students make them deserving. pic.twitter.com/EyqwI2VwnE

— Jason Compson (@JCompson_III) December 18, 2020

I’ll note that the description given above that this is the CDC’s reasoning doesn’t appear to be correct. The people quoted as experts on the topic rang from academia to the field of economics, but they don’t represent the CDC as far as I can tell. Regardless, that any news organization would actually publicize this disgusting nonsense shows just how far the media have fallen.

Note the irony of the first man quoted. Harald Schmidt is supposedly an “expert in ethics,” yet he’s stumping for purposely letting old people die to “level the playing field” over some delusional pursuit of racial justice. Besides, it is older populations of all races that pose the greatest risk to themselves and society. They are more likely to spread the virus, and they are far, far more likely to perish of it. Giving vaccines to 30 year old black men over 80 year old white women is just anti-science nonsense, no matter how good it makes the wokest among us feel.

The article then gets to Marc Lipsitch, who claims that teachers shouldn’t be prioritized because it’s a predominantly white profession. This all sounds an awful lot like eugenics, picking and choosing who potentially lives or dies based on their race and the job they hold. Meanwhile, the third expert wants teachers to be given the vaccine right away because even though they are mostly white, they help “black and brown” people. Everything comes back to race.

I don’t know how you continue to function as a society like this. Eventually, you are going to make people despise each other so much that things get even uglier than they are. The closest thing to harmony in a society comes from treating everyone equally and fairly. To the extent that things need to be fixed in the criminal justice system, they should be fixed. Bad schools should be treated as such instead of letting the teachers unions rule the roost. All of those things can help lift people up. What doesn’t lift people up is deciding that racism is suddenly good if it meets the narrative of the woke. You’d hope the “paper of record” would be above printing this kind of drivel, but they are apparently not.

(Please follow me on Twitter! @bonchieredstate)