Whenever I need a good chuckle, I will go to see what new articles Amanda Marcotte has posted on Salon. She wrote, at 1:07 PM EDT on Thursday, August 12^th, It’s OK to blame the unvaccinated — they are robbing the rest of us of our freedoms. As usual, Miss Marcotte has blamed the evil reich-wing Trump supporters as the problem:

I really wanted to get back to my spin class. And for a couple of months, I did just that. Exercising at home for the past year was fine, but nothing beats a 45-minute spin class for leaving one red-faced and sopping wet with sweat. But it’s that “sopping wet” part that became a problem this week when the gym sent out a memo bringing back their indoor mask mandate. This isn’t a 5-minute jaunt in a grocery store with a mask. Exercising with a sweat-soaked mask is like being waterboarded. So I canceled my class and sent a polite but angry note to my gym. Philadelphia’s new regulations allow businesses to choose between mask and vaccine mandates, and they chose poorly, penalizing those who did the right thing to coddle those who refuse. Masking the already vaccinated to protect the unvaccinated helps a little, but is a little like trying to cover someone in a rainstorm by holding an index card over their head.

Miss Marcotte is just hopping mad that her rights are being violated! Of course, she wants other people’s rights, their privacy rights — something, as an abortion-up-until-the-final-contraction supporter she otherwise strongly supports — to take a back seat to her being able to go to her spin class. When it comes to other people’s rights, she’s kind of like Dirty Harry.

No, who I am mad at is the willfully unvaccinated, people who, out of irrationality and often raw Republican tribalism, got us into this mess in the first place. I am incandescent with rage that millions of Americans are putting it on the rest of us to protect them from COVID-19, just so they can avoid a simple, free shot that is available at every pharmacy.

Republicans, always ready to destroy lives for some perceived political gain, aren’t even hiding anymore that they think being pro-COVID is good politics. As CNN reports, there’s “a GOP-wide effort to use the fears and frustrations of Americans worried about another round of school closures and lockdowns as cudgels against their Democratic opponents.”

But, of course, the return of restrictions is the direct result of Republican efforts to dissuade Americans from getting vaccinated and keep those COVID-19 case rates high. It’s important to remember that this is still a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Case rates are rising rapidly among the unvaccinated, who tend to reject other prevention measures along with vaccines. There are also breakthrough infections, though they affect fewer than one-third of 1% of the vaccinated.

You get the drift, but Miss Marcotte being angry at Republicans is hardly anything new; it’s her default status. And it’s hardly the first time she’s blamed the fact that not everybody is vaccinated on “Donald Trump’s America.”

Still, as she continues to blame conservatives, I have to wonder: does the former Brooklynite, now in the City of Brotherly Love, ever read The New York Times?

Why Only 28 Percent of Young Black New Yorkers Are Vaccinated

As the Delta variant courses through New York City, many young Black New Yorkers remain distrustful of the vaccine.

By Joseph Goldstein and Matthew Sedacca | August 12, 2021 | Updated: 3:55 PM EDT

A construction site safety manager in Queens said that as a Black man, he was more worried about the prospect of being stopped by the police than he was about getting Covid-19.

A graduate student in the Bronx who had not gotten vaccinated said her worst fears seemed confirmed when a vaccine that the government was directing to Black and poorer neighborhoods was briefly suspended over a small number of dangerous blood clots.

And a civil rights activist in the Bronx said he grew suspicious when he heard last year that politicians were prioritizing minority neighborhoods for coronavirus vaccinations.

“Since when does America give anything good to Black people first?” said the activist, Hawk Newsome, a 44-year-old Black Lives Matter leader who is unvaccinated.

All three situations reflect a trend that has become a major concern to public health experts: Young Black New Yorkers are especially reluctant to get vaccinated, even as the Delta variant is rapidly spreading among their ranks. City data shows that only 28 percent of Black New Yorkers ages 18 to 44 years are fully vaccinated, compared with 48 percent of Latino residents and 52 percent of white residents in that age group.

This vaccination gap is emerging as the latest stark racial disparity in an epidemic full of them. Epidemiologists say they expect this third wave will hit Black New Yorkers especially hard.

Of course, it isn’t just in the Big Apple; we pointed out on Tuesday that the statistics provided by The Philadelphia Inquirer show that in only two of the fifteen zip codes with the lowest rates of vaccination, 19116 and 19135, do white Philadelphians compose the largest racial/ethnic group. In nine if the fifteen zip codes with the lowest vaccination rates, blacks make up 70% or more of the population, and over 90% in zip codes 19132 and 19138. More, of the 15 most heavily vaccinated zip codes, white Philadelphians are the plurality in 14 of them, with over 50% of the population in 12 of them, and 49% and 47% in the other two. Only in zip code 19104 are whites not the plurality.

Philadelphia being Miss Marcotte’s new home, I would have expected “a senior politics writer at Salon” to have at least an online subscription to the Inquirer, a self-described “anti racist news organization,” but, then again, she almost never writes about Philly anyway.

Me? I don’t live in Philadelphia, and never have,^[1]I have done work in the city, though more in the outlying counties. and I have never lived in New York City. I do, however, pay good money to subscribe to The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington Post because by citing known-to-be-liberal news sources, there is never any grounds to dismiss my information because it comes from some evil reich wing blog.

In 2020, black voters gave Joe Biden between 87 and 90% of their votes, so it’s kind of difficult for Miss Marcotte to complain that those resisting getting the COVID-19 vaccine are all evil Republicans trying “to stick it to the liberals and undermine Biden’s presidency,” when black Americans are the racial/ethnic demographic which have been most resistant.

The Inquirer used to run a lot of stories about black resistance to the vaccines, but that ended a couple of months ago, and, as I said, South Philadelphia’s Amanda Marcotte doesn’t seem to read the Inquirer.

While it’s true that I like to pick on Miss Marcotte, she’s really just an illustration of the larger left, the ones trying to blame Republicans for lower vaccination rates than they’d like, while ignoring the Democrats’ most loyal voting demographic, which also happens to be the nation’s least vaccine compliant racial/ethnic group.