In Chicago, Black residents have been dying at rates four times higher than Asians, three times higher than Latinos and nearly two times higher than white residents since the start of the surge of the Omicron variant of COVID in early December 2021. This is part of a study by the local public radio (WBEZ) and published by the Chicago Sun Times based on data from the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Black people were dying at alarmingly disproportionate rates. But now there are safe and effective vaccines against COVID. Disturbingly, the article says that among Chicago’s four largest racial and ethnic groups, Black Chicagoans remain the least vaccinated. About one-half of the city’s Black population is still unvaccinated.
While there may still be issues of ability to get vaccines easily (for instance, recent high school students’ walkouts demanded sites for vaccines and testing be opened near their schools), there is also a serious problem of what is “infecting” people’s thinking. Why are people refusing to take basic health precautions to protect both themselves and others from getting a virus that is killing Black people in many cases completely unnecessarily? People are refusing to get the vaccines because of a combination of crazy conspiracy theories, other anti-scientific b.s. and rampant individualism promoted by some celebrities, athletes, religious figures and other “influencers.” One of these influencers, headquartered in Chicago, is the lunatic reactionary anti-vaxxer Louis Farra-Con with his crazy conspiracy theories, anti-scientific and harmful nonsense.
Listen to just a part of what Bob Avakian (BA) has to say in “Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating,” analyzing this situation (and then read the whole thing):
We have witnessed statements and actions by influential Black celebrities, in sports as well as the arts, which reflect and encourage anti-scientific ways of thinking, including disinformation about and discouraging people from getting the vaccines against COVID, when Black people (and other people of color) are dying at higher rates than others from COVID, and the vaccines have been proven safe and very effective against serious illness and death from COVID. This spreading of anti-scientific disinformation is very harmful, both in its immediate effects, and in strategic terms.
Yes, it is true that, in the history of this country, Black people have been the victims of horrific medical experiments, and still today they are subjected to discrimination, and at times uncaring and even harmful treatment, in the realm of health care. And, yes, it is true that Black people have been, and continue to be, subjected to vicious and often murderous oppression at the hands of government authorities. But all that is certainly true of Native Americans as well. Yet they have a much higher rate of vaccination against COVID. What they do not seem to have among them, at least not as a significant factor, is the phenomenon of prominent and influential people spreading anti-scientific disinformation about the vaccines and active discouragement from getting vaccinated.
With regard to vaccines, and dealing with COVID generally, as with all social problems and their solutions, what is needed is an evidence-based scientific approach.
BA goes on to call out the great harm that rampant individualism (looking out for yourself... me, me, me) does and it is such a big problem in the outlook of all sections of the people in the U.S. Influential people promoting anti-vaccine poison is a reflection of this extreme individualism.
All this contributes directly to causing great harm to people being hard hit by COVID and to COVID continuing to be out of control. If that weren’t bad enough, as BA brings out,
What a terrible situation where some Black people and other oppressed people can actually find themselves in the same place as those fascists who regard them as inferior sub-humans and want to deny them basic rights, lock them up permanently, or outright exterminate them!
To anyone who parrots this anti-vaccine garbage among the people—watch this video clip of Trump at an Arizona rally on January 15, 2022, and ask yourself why is that genocidal fascist pig Trump complaining about too many Black people getting vaccinated?” You end up looking like those fools wearing Blacks for Trump T-shirts bobbing their heads as props for this genocidal racists.
BA tells the scientific truth about how we can get out of this horrific situation:
In most fundamental terms, what this pandemic has further revealed about the utterly bankrupt and outmoded (“past its date of expiration”) nature of this system—and more particularly how the rare situation that now exists, with the “deepening and sharpening conflicts among the ruling powers,” which have been sharply expressed in relation to the COVID pandemic, and in countless other ways—all this provides a stronger basis and greater openings to break the hold of this system over masses of people.
The way forward—the only way forward—out of this madness is revolution: a real revolution to overthrow this monstrous system of capitalism-imperialism, and bring something much better into being.
