Submitted by Mark D. Fichtel
I was embarrassed for Amanda Cuda, who wrote, and for the Greenwich Time, which published the article on the data released by the CT Department of Public Health that purported to show how white people were unfairly benefiting from Covid-19 vaccinations.
This type of article, with its sloppy analysis and false claims, is typical of the laziness and bias of much of today’s left-leaning press that only needlessly inflames the racial and political tensions across the U.S.
When one takes the time to try to add up the vaccine percentages cited in the article and received by each racial group, 56.1% went to those identifying as white, 5.2% to Hispanics, 3.4% to blacks, 2.6% to Asians, 6.2% to “multiple” races, and 17.6% to “other” races. There are three problems with these numbers.
First, the figures only add up to 91.1%. Not accounting for nearly 9% of the population should have meant either ignoring the data or pressing the DPH for better figures before publishing anything, and the weak excuses cited in the article for the holes in the numbers are not exculpatory. Any student who tried to draw the conclusions made in the article from such incomplete figures should receive a failing grade.
Second, the numbers do not conform to any racial or ethnic breakdown of CT’s population available anywhere on the internet. Nowhere will one find a breakdown where 32.7% of CT’s population is multiple race, other race, and unknown.
Third, and most important, the headline (“Racial disparities seen in distribution of COVID vaccine”) and the implication throughout much of the article that whites are receiving a disproportionate and unfair amount of the vaccine are both absolutely and blatantly wrong. Whites are currently estimated by all credible sources to be 67% of CT’s population. On that basis, if anything, whites have been discriminated against in receiving the vaccine, not the other way around, as the article would like to falsely try to prove.
It’s a shame that the Greenwich Time, which has so much good in its pages, would publish such a shoddy and unnecessarily racially divisive article. You owe all your readers an apology.
Mark D. Fichtel, Greenwich