Op-Ed: The Racism of Vax Mandates

After receiving a fair amount of blowback for my insistence that the Arvada Center’s vaccine mandate is racist, I figured I would clarify the argument for those who saw the scandalous image of performers in blackface in front of the building. “You just don’t like vaccines!” I heard as I was accused of being racist myself by those who likely would find voter ID laws to be racist but see nothing problematic with firing people who decide a COVID vaccine isn’t for them. Let’s dig into how racist vaccine passports really are:

The Left’s Standard For Racism is Based on Impact

To leftists, any government policy that leads to different results for “protected” groups is automatically a racist policy. This principle is what underpins the left’s insistence that America is a systemically racist country. By their logic, the existence of any measurable difference in outcome between people of different ethnic groups is proof positive that underlying racism exists. Racial differences in scholastic outcome? It’s because the curriculum is designed for one racial group. Racial differences in wealth? It’s because capitalism itself is a system built to uniquely benefit certain skin tones over others. Yet there is a fundamental difference between getting an ID (which is an identical process for everyone) and being forced to make the exact same medical decisions.

Usurping a Person’s Bodily Autonomy is Racist, Sexist, Ageist, and Ableist

We were all made very different from one another, and in no way are our differences more obvious than in our medical needs. As much as modern medicine has helped us understand what causes, prevents, or treats specific medical conditions, every person has a unique combination of needs and physical traits that demands unique treatment. It is self-evident that a world of billions of unique people will have billions of unique medical circumstances.

Many medical issues can be demonstrated to disproportionally affect people of different ethnicities. For example, sickle cell disease is much more common among people of African ancestry. Males suffer from Parkinson’s disease and Autism at a higher rate than women. There are limitless combinations of genetic and physiological characteristics that make it essential that everybody has the right to choose what is the best course of treatment for themselves.

Any one-size-fits-all medical mandate throws both the right to personal bodily autonomy and the wonderful physical diversity of mankind out the window. It assumes that a given medical intervention is always the proper choice for a patient – no matter what their risk profile or preference. Usurping the authority a person has over their body means the person cannot effectively make decisions that are responsive to their gender, age, disability, or ethnicity. This is despite the fact that the person will bear the consequences of whatever decisions are made.

For example, it has been clearly demonstrated that healthy, young men are at almost zero risk from a COVID-19 infection, but bear the highest risk of cardiovascular complications resulting from the mRNA vaccines. In Colorado, 20-39-year-olds represent nearly 40% of reported COVID-19 cases, yet represent only 2.39% of COVID-linked deaths (about 200 COVID-related deaths). Yet this age group shows 2,922 reported vaccine-related events in the CDC’s VAERS database (which the government admits contains underreported totals) including 4 reported deaths. In total, the current VAERS tally is 89 Colorado deaths post-vaccine.

It should be noted that a VAERS death does not mean the patient died due to the vaccine. Similarly, a patient counted as a COVID-19 death did not necessarily die because of the virus, and the average age of COVID death in the US is 78 – greater than the average life expectancy.

Race Affects Medical Decisions

Black Americans have every right to be concerned about taking COVID-19 vaccines. More than that, they have every right to make their own medical decisions. Black Lives Matter leaders in New York have called COVID-19 restrictions “another reason to be racist, to put us in prison.” The overarching principle is that a one-size-fits-all restriction that discriminates against people who make different medical decisions will always be racist because medical decisions are frequently made in response to physiological concerns linked to ethnicity, age, and gender.

In our previous article concerning the Arvada Center, we rightly noted the discrepancy in the medical choices being made by blacks and whites, and that the implementation of a vaccine mandate for attendees of shows would therefore discriminate against blacks who have understandably decided not to take the vaccine. It is a policy that excludes black citizens based on their individual medical situations and creates a situation where many blacks (and people of all ethnicities) are discriminated against by a publicly funded institution.