As I was preparing to write this, another email landed in my inbox. Like so many before, the author sought to redirect criticism of Republican vaccine hesitancy by pointing in a different direction.
“[I]t seems that a very large percentage of African-Americans is not vaccinated,” he wrote. “Certainly that’s true in New York City. I doubt they are Republicans let alone part of [Donald] Trump’s base.”
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This refrain is well-worn by now. How can the media focus on Republican resistance to coronavirus vaccines when there are so many Black Americans who haven’t gotten a shot? It’s not a complicated bit of rhetorical judo, attempting to shift attention away from vocal and obvious refusal by the political right and onto more subtle opposition on what is generally presented (as by today’s emailer) as a proxy for the left.
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Last week, for example, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) attempted something similar.
“It’s up to the Democrats, just as it’s up to the Republicans, to try to get as many people vaccinated, but we respect the fact that if people don’t want the vaccination, we’re not going to force it on them,” Patrick said during an interview on Fox News. “… [W]e’re encouraging people to take it, but they’re doing nothing for the African American community that has a significant high number of unvaccinated people, so they need to address that.”
In the abstract, Patrick and the emailer would seem to have a point: vaccination rates for Black Americans are generally lower than those for Whites. On the graph below, a state on the diagonal line has seen equal vaccination rates for Whites as Blacks, according to state data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation. (For the purposes of my own convenience, the term “states” in this article will include D.C.) States below that line have seen a higher percentage of Whites than Blacks vaccinated — as is the case with nearly every state.
What this obscures is a point I made earlier this month but that bears repeating: Comparing rates for Whites and Blacks does suggest that there’s greater hesitancy with the latter group, a population that overwhelmingly votes Democratic. But if “Black” is being used as a proxy for “those on the left,” “White” is necessarily being used as a proxy for “those on the right” — which isn’t fair, since so many White Americans are also Democrats. In other words, Republicans are (probably subconsciously) trying to use the fact that most Republicans are White to imply that most Whites are Republican, which isn’t true. The reality is that Black vaccination rates do reflect a greater hesitancy than is true of Whites overall, but Blacks are less hesitant that White Republicans, the focal point of the aforementioned criticism.
A poll from NBC News released on Tuesday offers an interesting lens on the question. It broke out self-reported vaccination rates by a number of demographic groups. People who voted for President Biden last year, for example, overwhelmingly say they’ve been vaccinated. Republicans largely say they haven’t. In this poll, unlike many others, Whites are less likely to report having been vaccinated than Blacks.
That doesn’t actually comport with the data, as the first graph in this article shows. It is the case that in 35 of the 43 states for which Kaiser has data, Whites have been vaccinated at higher rates than Blacks. Kaiser’s data allows us to show this in a different way, too: by comparing the density of a racial group in the population with its density in the population.
Asian Americans, for example, are more likely to be overrepresented among the vaccinated, meaning that they make up a larger percentage of a state’s vaccinated population than its population overall. Blacks are more likely to be underrepresented. For Whites, it’s a mix.
But, again, we need to filter out politics. If we look at the number of states where each group is over- or underrepresented, we see that the Black population is underrepresented in both red and blue states. Whites, though, are more likely to be underrepresented in red states (that is, states that voted for Trump in 2020) and overrepresented in blue ones. In red states, White vaccination density was more than a percentage point lower than the actual representation in the population, on average. In blue states, White vaccination density averaged about half a point higher than population density.
You can see this same discrepancy in the first graph. The dots are color-coded by 2020 vote. The red dots — the Trump-voting ones — are lower and to the left of the blue ones, indicating lower vaccination rates for both Blacks and Whites in more-Republican states.
Since state governments don’t generally collect partisanship data for obvious reasons, we are left having to estimate the extent of Republican hesitancy through either vote-result or polling analysis. Last month, Kaiser Family Foundation asked Americans how they felt about vaccination. Breaking out Whites by political party shows precisely the overarching point: White Republicans are far more hesitant about being vaccinated than are Blacks.
In fact, Kaiser estimated that more than half of those who at that point hadn’t been vaccinated were Republican. About 13 percent were Black, a figure in line with the national population.
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All of this has been a fairly long way of responding to that email. So, I’ll make it concise. Yes, Black Americans are both more likely to express hesitation about getting vaccinated than Whites and (in part due to structural challenges) are less likely to have gotten a shot. But by focusing on Black vaccination rates, Republicans are simply trying to draw a false equivalence with the left broadly, using those higher rates among Whites to cast Blacks as laggards — even though White rates are higher because of White Democrats. If you remove White Democrats from the White totals, Black vaccination rates would almost certainly be higher.
Republicans often complain that Democrats make things about race for political gain. Then how would you describe Dan Patrick’s argument?