Are you a 75-year-old in a lower Northern Michigan rural county – maybe a middle class white person with a two-car household?
Good luck getting the COVID-19 vaccine because things have changed with how the State of Michigan is now distributing the vaccines. You are no longer a priority to them.
According to Interlochen Public Radio [1] and numerous other sources, there are frustrated seniors all over Michigan because their counties are receiving fewer vaccines due to Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer and her Health and Human Services Department’s new criteria for vaccine distribution.
No longer can a county request the number of vaccines that they need like they’ve been able to do since the vaccines were approved. Nope. Now the state is in charge.
When you live in an obnoxious and tyrannical democratic run state, you are literally at their mercy with your health care. Your lives are in their hands. And they are totally allowed to discriminate as they please.
And you will just live with it.
Or not.
It looks like too many Michigan counties have been asking for too many vaccines and the great Joe Biden can’t keep up.
Because of the scarcity of the vaccines, the state of Michigan has changed their “formula” on how it is supplying vaccines to different regions based on population size and other factors.
What factors, you ask?
Well, among other things, it looks like you have to be of the right race and income level if you live in Michigan in order for your county to be a priority to receive the vaccines that it needs.
The Michigan Dept. of Health and Human Services (MDHHS i.e. Governor Whitmer) is using something called the CDC Social Vulnerability Index [2] in order to ration and distribute the COVID-19 vaccine. It uses socioeconomic status (education, income, occupation), household composition and disability, minority status and languages spoken, housing type and transportation in addition to other criteria.
According to uppermichiganssource.com [3], a Facebook post by Schoolcraft Memorial Hospital on Monday confirms that the new calculation is heavily based on metrics tied to county population, demographics and the social vulnerability index.
But no one actually seems to have the exact formula the state of Michigan is using. No one knows the exact recipe and how many parts of this and that are being used in the final decisions that the state government is making.
Lisa Peacock, Health Officer for the Benzie Leelanau District Health Dept. and the Health Dept. of Northwest Michigan has said “We have not yet seen the data they are using for this calculation.”
If you look at the top ten highest populated counties in Michigan that Whitmer is probably most concerned about, you’d end up with 70% of them being blue counties who voted for Biden to be President. I can see why those counties would be a priority for her and not the people north of Mt. Pleasant.
The people in the north are in the wrong demographic for her – and we are spread apart in suburbs and on farms. We are not living in her favorite large liberal cities.
Linda Vail, Public Health Officer for Ingham County, thinks that the new system [4] based on “social vulnerability” is all hunky-dory. She said, “They’ve really been refining a formula, so that equity does lead when we have a very scare resource. The state now has a population-based and vulnerability index formula, as well as throwing in some sort of essential personnel calculation.”
Equity.
That seems to be the democratic buzzword. No more equality. Equity is where it’s at.
Justice through favoritism. VP Kamala Harris definitely agrees with it. She tweeted out a cute little video [5] about equity last year.
Harris doesn’t want everyone to get the same thing and have the same opportunities. She wants to give each “vulnerable” person the resources and opportunities to attain equity with those ahead of them.
But in this vaccine scenario, in this life-and-death situation, those ahead of “them” get nothing.
Equity is, in fact, discrimination.
And, in this case, equity will probably result in the deaths of certain people that the government didn’t deem worthy of prioritizing.
I wonder if Whitmer knows about the civil rights guarantees in Michigan about unlawful discrimination.
Michigan law prohibits discrimination [6] in employment, education, housing, public accommodations and public service.
According to the state of Michigan, we have a right to public service and a right to file a complaint if because of religion, race, color, national origin, age, sex, marital status or disability we have been denied goods, services or advantages on an equal basis by a public facility, department, agency, board or commission, owned or operated, managed, or licensed by the state, a political subdivision or an agency thereof, including law enforcement agencies, or a tax exempt private agency established to provide services to the public.
Hey, Whitmer… you can’t ration vaccines based on race.
The Federal Government has a similar law in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 [7] which protects us from discrimination based on race in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance. If we’re eligible for Medicaid, other health care or human services, we can’t be denied assistance because of our race.
But I guess Whitmer is special. She doesn’t have to follow any of those laws because….
- She’s a democrat and
- We’re under an emergency order.
Discrimination and tyranny via democratic emergency orders continue their perilous march through our lives and unfortunately, there’s probably much more to come.