It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s Twitter photo was taken in a bar.

It has been a while since we noted our good friend Amanda Marcotte. Native Texan and ex-Brooklynite, Miss Marcotte and her POSSLQ Marc Faletti moved to Philadelphia a couple of years ago, and one would think that, being in what I have had too much occasion to call Killadelphia, you’d think she would have at least mentioned the carnage in her new home town.

But, alas! Donald Trump, now 4½ months out of office, still shares that South Philly apartment with Mr Faletti and her, living rent-free in Miss Marcotte’s head.

There is no solution to the GOP’s vaccine refusal

COVID denialism lost its political usefulness months ago, but the GOP zombies keep on refusing to get the vaccine

By Amanda Marcotte | June 7, 2021 | 1:09 PM EDT

In the past six months, we’ve all witnessed the near-miraculous effectiveness of the vaccines against COVID-19  and President Joe Biden’s success at turning the joke of Donald Trump’s vaccine plan into a well-oiled machine. Anyone who wants the shot in the U.S. can get it. Yet, despite an initial surge of interest in vaccines in the mid-spring, there’s been a drastic drop-off in vaccination rates just ahead of Biden’s Independence Day goal for a return to summer grilling.

“The United States is averaging fewer than 1 million shots per day, a decline of more than two-thirds from the peak of 3.4 million in April,” the Washington Post reports, noting that “[s]mall armies of health workers and volunteers often outnumber the people showing up to get shots at clinics” in more conservative areas like Utah, North Carolina and Tennessee.

“Experts are concerned that states across the South, where vaccination rates are lagging, could face a surge in coronavirus cases over the summer,” the New York Times further reports. While many states in the Northeast have reached Biden’s 70% benchmark, the Times notes that only “about half of adults or fewer have received a dose” in 15 red states.

As vaccine rates have been lagging, a number of reasons for what tends to be called “vaccine hesitancy” have been documented through polls and other research. Issues include a lack of access, skepticism that COVID-19 is particularly dangerous, a lack of trust in the vaccines, a belief in conspiracy theories and fear of side effects.

No doubt all these aspects are true to one extent or another, and there’s certainly evidence that some working-class people simply are struggling to find the time to get the shots and recover from them. But the glaring geographical differences give away the one deeply uncomfortable reality about what is driving much, if not most, of the discrepancies in vaccination rates: Republicans are refusing to get vaccinated out of pure spite.

There’s more at the link, with Miss Marcotte doing everything she can to blame the evil Donald Trump and the GOP.

But then there’s this:

Less than 25 percent of Black Americans have reportedly received their first COVID-19 shot

Brigid Kennedy, Contributing Writer | Monday, June 7, 2021 | 5:28 PM

As of Monday, less than 25 percent of Black Americans have received their first COVID-19 shot. Health experts tell Politico that “ingrained” government skepticism, lack of transportation, inability to take time off, and deficient community outreach could explain the lag. Meanwhile, vaccination rates among other minority groups, like Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans, continue to rise following government outreach.

Miss Marcotte’s #TrumpDerangementSyndrome causes her to miss things, to miss a lot of things.

According to the Biden administration and public health experts, it’s not that minority populations are “openly hostile” to vaccines, it’s that they need “reassurance and prodding,” Politico writes. Octavio Martinez, a member of the White House’s COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force, said the government’s equity-focused efforts will require “relationship building and it’s going to take a little longer.” He added, “We have a systemic issue here.”

In Washington, D.C., Black Americans constitute nearly 8 in 10 new cases and close to 90 percent of deaths since May 1. White House efforts that have succeeded elsewhere have yet to gain “similar traction” in Black communities, per Politico.

Source: List of U.S. states and territories by African-American population.

The Associated Press survey estimated that black Americans gave 90% of their votes to Joe Biden, and that is very much in line with the traditional Democratic dominance among black voters. And the South, the very area in which Miss Marcotte claims that Republicans are not getting vaccinated to show loyalty to President Trump and spite Mr Biden, is the area with the heaviest concentration of black Americans. If the South are taking the vaccines more slowly, if black Americans have shown a much greater reluctance to take the vaccine — something Miss Marcotte should know, in that her hometown newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, has been writing about that almost constantly — and the South is much more heavily black than the rest of the country, is it the evil reich-wing white Republicans who are not taking the vaccine, or is it that greater percentage of the population who are black?

Miss Marcotte’s #TrumpDerangementSyndrome causes her to miss things, to miss a lot of things.

Philadelphia is awash with stories about the murder of Christine Lugo. Does a political blogger in Philadelphia not read the Inquirer? Does she not watch the news on WPVI-TV, Channel 6, or Channel 3, the CBS station, or Channel 29, the local Fox affiliate, or Channel 10, the NBC station? Really, for a political blogger, someone who ought to be a news junkie, it would be pretty difficult to have missed that story.

But, rather than write about that, rather than even mentioning it in passing, Miss Marcotte wrote a poorly researched political piece without ever considering the possibility of an alternate explanation.

We are not surprised. 🙂