Whites now more likely to die from Covid-19 than Blacks, partly because of resistance to vaccines, other prevention

The racial gap in age-adjusted Covid-19 death rates narrowed, then reversed.
(Graph by Dan Keating, The Washington Post; click here for the interactive version.)

White people are now more likely to die from Covid-19 than Black people — a dramatic shift from earlier in the pandemic when certain minority groups were more likely to die from the disease, Akilah Johnson and Dan Keating report for The Washington Post.

Usually, when such a shift occurs, it's because the worse-off group got better. In this case, the better-off group got worse, in large measure because rural whites have resisted vaccination and other measures to prevent Covid-19 infection. Early in the pandemic, Black Americans, afflicted by long-running health disparities that predate the pandemic, fell victim to the virus more often as those with "hypertension, diabetes and obesity, all of which beset Black people at higher rates and earlier in life than White people." But as vaccines came along, Blacks were more likely to get them than rural whites.

“After it became clear that communities of color were being disproportionately affected, racial equity started to become the parlance of the pandemic, in words and deeds,” Johnson and Keating write. “As it did, vaccine access and acceptance within communities of color grew — and so did the belief among some White conservatives, who form the core of the Republican base, that vaccine requirements and mask mandates infringe on personal liberties.”

The phenomenon was essentially predicted in 2019 by Jonathan M. Metzl, director of Vanderbilt University's Department of Medicine, Health, and Society, in a book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America's Heartland, which examined how the politicization of public health furthered mistrust in medical institutions. The book served as a sort of "prehistory" for the pandemic, Metzl said. It detailed how some uninsured white patients declined life-saving procedures because it meant they'd have to sign up for health benefits provided by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Metzl told the Post that rejecting public-health measures is about "dogma, more so than a mistrust of the science of vaccines or masks."

Fayette County in Tennessee (Wikpedia map)

The Post's object example is Fayette County, Tennessee, and Skill Wilson, who was an unvaccinated paramedic in Somerville, is the prime example. As the pandemic raged in nearby Memphis, Wilson and his wife felt their county of 42,000 was more protected because there were simply "less people, less chance of exposure." Eventually, Wilson "joined the choir of critics opposing vaccination requirements" and "commiserated with like-minded people in Facebook groups and on Parler and Rumble, the largely unmoderated social networking platforms popular with conservatives." The 59-year-old died from Covid-19 falling ill after transporting an infected patient to the hospital. 

Wilson's widow, Hollie, said after Skill died in January, "We’re Republicans, and 100 percent believe that it’s each individual’s choice — their freedom" when it comes to getting a vaccine. "We decided to err on the side of not doing it and accept the consequences. And now, here we are in the middle of planning the funeral."