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> This theory checks off certain boxes that make it resonate well within current discourse frameworks, but it doesn’t really make a lot of sense. If the coronav

> This theory checks off certain boxes that make it resonate well within current discourse frameworks, but it doesn’t really make a lot of sense. If the coronavirus vaccines were only being given to black people, then you could see how someone might reason that it is a trick. But they are being given to everyone, including over 100 million white people. Are we meant to think that black people who aren’t getting the vaccine believe that the government is poisoning 100 million white people because the government has a racist history of poisoning black people? The racial analysis here would tell you that there is no way the white supremacist government would do such a thing and so the vaccine must be safe! Yes, this theory was always ridiculous. Like many other things we hear from the prestige media, it barely merits an eye-roll, let alone a full refutation. Nevertheless, I appreciate Bruenig taking the time. Sadly, our cultural-professional-managerial elites live in a weird echo chamber where such things must be said. I wonder if they themselves even believe what is coming out of their mouths.

refurb 5y ago
Dude is trying too hard. The rationale is simple “the govt is clearly willing to harm a group of people so why should I trust them?” It’s not that the vaccine is another example of minorities being targeted, it’s an example of where the govt say “trust us” and minority groups have a bit more historical awareness where the govt said that and lied.
- civilized 5y ago
  > I would guess that awareness of the Tuskegee Experiment and black history more generally is greater among those with higher education than those with lower education. If this guess is right, then knowledge of historical racist medical abuses is actually strongly correlated with getting the vaccine.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    That's way too big of a hypothetical to make any of the statistics derived from it worth anything.
    - civilized 5y ago
      Bruenig is just being humorously understated here. Obviously more educated people are more likely to know history. Come on.
      - Talanes 5y ago
        I'm not sure how that's obvious? School isn't where I learned about the Tuskegee experiment, so why would I assume that's the primary way people learn about it? That's a claim that actually needs some data to back it up.
        civilized 5y ago
        I think this is pretty straightforwardly what any social scientist would expect, but if we must have data, see Figure 4 of https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3221924/#!po=29.8077 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3221924/#!po=29...
        Talanes 5y ago
        >I think this is pretty straightforwardly what any social scientist would expect And statements like that are why I don't trust any social science without digging a few layers deeper than the data that's initially presented.
      - anigbrowl 5y ago
        I think you're overlooking the fact that black people are much more likely to know about it than white people, and that it's not a function of educational level alone.
        civilized 5y ago
        No, I'm not overlooking that supposed fact, which also isn't a fact. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3221924/#!po=29.8077 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3221924/#!po=29...
  - Infinitesimus 5y ago
    That's a big if and amusingly detached. Consider the oral history of the Tulsa massacre and how many "educated" people didn't know about it. There's is a lot of weight coming from a grand parent telling you "hey, this bad stuff happened back in my day so you can't trust these folks" vs reading it in a book and that's hard to quantify. Fwiw I do think there are other factors at play more related to general socioeconomic issues. They just might also correlate strongly with race, zip code and a bunch of stuff.
bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
How do you know that the government is giving the same vaccines to whites and non-whites? I mean, I'm white, and I'm pretty sure that they are, but I could forgive a black person for not being so sure.
- civilized 5y ago
  How do we know that Hillary Clinton isn't harvesting adrenochrome from children?
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Conspiracy theories don't even make sense within their own universe any more. At a mass vaccination clinic, there is no "black line" or ""white line", people just randomly get in line, and since a vial has multiple doses in it, it's obvious the same vial serves all races of people in the line. Favorite recent meme I saw "People who believe in conspiracy theories have never been project managers." That is, when you know how much of a herculean task it is to organize a group of say 20 people with a relatively small project, you understand how impossible it would be to have some mass, global conspiracy where everyone managed to keep their mouth shut.
  - sdlkfjaskasdf 5y ago
    I dont mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but there is also only a single line at school, at colleges, at jobs, and at the courthouse -- yet outcomes are very, very different between different groups.
  - meowface 5y ago
    It's not about how ridiculous the conspiracy theory is when considering the full context. Obviously it's not the case that the US is using the COVID vaccines to experiment on certain races while excluding others. It's about why someone might believe such a thing and what you can to do to try to convince them otherwise. "They use the same vials" isn't a great argument to give to a skeptic. Unless you manage to get in the back rooms and observe the full chain of custody of every syringe, you can't know for sure you're getting the same thing as someone else. If your existing prior is that you are likely being deceived and tricked into receiving something that may harm you, it's rational to think they'll use techniques to make it seem like you aren't receiving any special treatment.
throwaway909495 5y ago
A better line of reasoning would be based on power symmetry rather than just race. The Tuskegee experiment happened because the black population was essentially powerless to fight back, perhaps coupled with a feeling of contempt from the ruling class towards them as a people group. Power preys on weakness. Fast forward to the current day, and although white populations have more power than black populations on average, the ruling elite has a total asymmetrical power advantage over both populations. Therefore, they are able to experiment upon the entire population without much repercussion. Black people understand powerlessness from their history, and therefore they know to be on guard (more hesitant). White people are less familiar with powerlessness, and can be caught off guard (less hesitant).
MikeUt 5y ago
The replies are so typical of these discussions. The media float a narrative without bothering to support it with any evidence. When someone actually looks and finds the easily available evidence says the exact opposite, that evidence is attacked and nitpicked as not rigorous enough to overturn the completely unsupported narrative. Where was all this skepticism before?
rallison 5y ago
> Yes, this theory was always ridiculous. Like many other things we hear from the prestige media, it barely merits an eye-roll, let alone a full refutation. Nevertheless, I appreciate Bruenig taking the time. I don't think that's fair. I find Bruenig's analysis reductive. It doesn't even look at Black vaccine hesitancy over time, which a halfway decent analysis would have done. What you see is that there is high hesitancy early on, and that hesitancy drops faster than many other groups as time progresses. It could be the case that skepticism, given the history of healthcare and the Black community, drove initial hesitancy, and then that waned as people saw millions of others do just fine. Bruenig's analysis would entirely miss that. He also takes a huge leap in equating skepticism of healthcare more broadly in the Black community with skepticism of the vaccine in particular. There are so, so many assumptions he is just completely skating past here. E.g., it could entirely be the case that there is broad skepticism of healthcare in the Black community at all educational levels because of issues that persist to this very day (e.g. it's pretty well known that many people working in healthcare believe Black people are less susceptible to physical pain than white people). So, it's entirely plausible that you can start with a higher level of skepticism with respect to anything healthcare related within the Black community (e.g. because of both historical and/or current problems), but see decreasing vaccine hesitancy as education levels increase (e.g. because that correlates with better understanding of the vaccines and the trials it goes through). All of this would be entirely consistent with the data Bruenig presents, but would be entirely inconsistent with his conclusions. What I am fundamentally getting at is that his analysis is reductive, and could potentially be explained by scenarios that are 100% counter to his conclusion.
chrismcb 5y ago
I'm not sure what you are saying. But there are black people who are refusing the vaccine because of what the government has done to blacks in the past.

refurb 5y ago

Dude is trying too hard. The rationale is simple “the govt is clearly willing to harm a group of people so why should I trust them?” It’s not that the vaccine is another example of minorities being targeted, it’s an example of where the govt say “trust us” and minority groups have a bit more historical awareness where the govt said that and lied.

civilized 5y ago
> I would guess that awareness of the Tuskegee Experiment and black history more generally is greater among those with higher education than those with lower education. If this guess is right, then knowledge of historical racist medical abuses is actually strongly correlated with getting the vaccine.
- Talanes 5y ago
  That's way too big of a hypothetical to make any of the statistics derived from it worth anything.
  - civilized 5y ago
    Bruenig is just being humorously understated here. Obviously more educated people are more likely to know history. Come on.
    - Talanes 5y ago
      I'm not sure how that's obvious? School isn't where I learned about the Tuskegee experiment, so why would I assume that's the primary way people learn about it? That's a claim that actually needs some data to back it up.
      - civilized 5y ago
        I think this is pretty straightforwardly what any social scientist would expect, but if we must have data, see Figure 4 of https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3221924/#!po=29.8077 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3221924/#!po=29...
        Talanes 5y ago
        >I think this is pretty straightforwardly what any social scientist would expect And statements like that are why I don't trust any social science without digging a few layers deeper than the data that's initially presented.
    - anigbrowl 5y ago
      I think you're overlooking the fact that black people are much more likely to know about it than white people, and that it's not a function of educational level alone.
      - civilized 5y ago
        No, I'm not overlooking that supposed fact, which also isn't a fact. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3221924/#!po=29.8077 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3221924/#!po=29...
- Infinitesimus 5y ago
  That's a big if and amusingly detached. Consider the oral history of the Tulsa massacre and how many "educated" people didn't know about it. There's is a lot of weight coming from a grand parent telling you "hey, this bad stuff happened back in my day so you can't trust these folks" vs reading it in a book and that's hard to quantify. Fwiw I do think there are other factors at play more related to general socioeconomic issues. They just might also correlate strongly with race, zip code and a bunch of stuff.

bobbylarrybobby 5y ago

How do you know that the government is giving the same vaccines to whites and non-whites? I mean, I'm white, and I'm pretty sure that they are, but I could forgive a black person for not being so sure.

civilized 5y ago
How do we know that Hillary Clinton isn't harvesting adrenochrome from children?
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Conspiracy theories don't even make sense within their own universe any more. At a mass vaccination clinic, there is no "black line" or ""white line", people just randomly get in line, and since a vial has multiple doses in it, it's obvious the same vial serves all races of people in the line. Favorite recent meme I saw "People who believe in conspiracy theories have never been project managers." That is, when you know how much of a herculean task it is to organize a group of say 20 people with a relatively small project, you understand how impossible it would be to have some mass, global conspiracy where everyone managed to keep their mouth shut.
- sdlkfjaskasdf 5y ago
  I dont mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but there is also only a single line at school, at colleges, at jobs, and at the courthouse -- yet outcomes are very, very different between different groups.
- meowface 5y ago
  It's not about how ridiculous the conspiracy theory is when considering the full context. Obviously it's not the case that the US is using the COVID vaccines to experiment on certain races while excluding others. It's about why someone might believe such a thing and what you can to do to try to convince them otherwise. "They use the same vials" isn't a great argument to give to a skeptic. Unless you manage to get in the back rooms and observe the full chain of custody of every syringe, you can't know for sure you're getting the same thing as someone else. If your existing prior is that you are likely being deceived and tricked into receiving something that may harm you, it's rational to think they'll use techniques to make it seem like you aren't receiving any special treatment.

throwaway909495 5y ago

A better line of reasoning would be based on power symmetry rather than just race. The Tuskegee experiment happened because the black population was essentially powerless to fight back, perhaps coupled with a feeling of contempt from the ruling class towards them as a people group. Power preys on weakness. Fast forward to the current day, and although white populations have more power than black populations on average, the ruling elite has a total asymmetrical power advantage over both populations. Therefore, they are able to experiment upon the entire population without much repercussion. Black people understand powerlessness from their history, and therefore they know to be on guard (more hesitant). White people are less familiar with powerlessness, and can be caught off guard (less hesitant).

MikeUt 5y ago

The replies are so typical of these discussions. The media float a narrative without bothering to support it with any evidence. When someone actually looks and finds the easily available evidence says the exact opposite, that evidence is attacked and nitpicked as not rigorous enough to overturn the completely unsupported narrative. Where was all this skepticism before?

rallison 5y ago

> Yes, this theory was always ridiculous. Like many other things we hear from the prestige media, it barely merits an eye-roll, let alone a full refutation. Nevertheless, I appreciate Bruenig taking the time. I don't think that's fair. I find Bruenig's analysis reductive. It doesn't even look at Black vaccine hesitancy over time, which a halfway decent analysis would have done. What you see is that there is high hesitancy early on, and that hesitancy drops faster than many other groups as time progresses. It could be the case that skepticism, given the history of healthcare and the Black community, drove initial hesitancy, and then that waned as people saw millions of others do just fine. Bruenig's analysis would entirely miss that. He also takes a huge leap in equating skepticism of healthcare more broadly in the Black community with skepticism of the vaccine in particular. There are so, so many assumptions he is just completely skating past here. E.g., it could entirely be the case that there is broad skepticism of healthcare in the Black community at all educational levels because of issues that persist to this very day (e.g. it's pretty well known that many people working in healthcare believe Black people are less susceptible to physical pain than white people). So, it's entirely plausible that you can start with a higher level of skepticism with respect to anything healthcare related within the Black community (e.g. because of both historical and/or current problems), but see decreasing vaccine hesitancy as education levels increase (e.g. because that correlates with better understanding of the vaccines and the trials it goes through). All of this would be entirely consistent with the data Bruenig presents, but would be entirely inconsistent with his conclusions. What I am fundamentally getting at is that his analysis is reductive, and could potentially be explained by scenarios that are 100% counter to his conclusion.

chrismcb 5y ago

I'm not sure what you are saying. But there are black people who are refusing the vaccine because of what the government has done to blacks in the past.