Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has chosen the wrong time to try and push her radical agenda.
She’s not living in the real world.
And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had this racist response to China’s big cover-up.
Most rational thinkers have come to the conclusion that the way to stop the Chinese coronavirus is through social distancing, heightening the medical capacity and research into vaccines and treatment.
Ocasio-Cortez is pushing for none of these things.
She’s focused with laser intensity on the fact that there is a racial discrepancy in the percentage of African Americans who are dying of coronavirus.
Dr. Fauci explained why African Americans have a higher death rate, “As Dr. Birx said correctly, it’s not that they are getting infected more often, it’s that when they do get infected their underlying medical conditions — the diabetes, hypertension, the obesity, the asthma — those are the kind of things that wind them up in the ICU and ultimately give him a higher death rate.”
Ocasio-Cortez thinks that given the fact that African Americans are more affected, slavery reparations are the way to help solve the coronavirus outbreak.
According to the Washington Examiner:
“COVID deaths are disproportionately spiking in Black + Brown communities,” the congresswoman tweeted. “Why? Because the chronic toll of redlining, environmental racism, wealth gap, etc. ARE underlying health conditions.”
“Inequality is a comorbidity,” she concluded. “COVID relief should be drafted with a lens of reparations.”
It’s hard to know where even to start dissecting this woke sandwich of intersectional buzzwords. Ocasio-Cortez is not technically wrong that the virus is manifesting itself differently in areas with different demographic makeups — after all, New York City is faring much worse than, say, Iowa. And if we’re very generous, we could probably come up with arguments that this is an indirect result of racism or the lingering influence of past racism. But many, many other factors could instead be driving this trend — for example, smoking rates.
To be fair to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, socioeconomic factors do sometimes make a difference in terms of health outcomes.
However, handing people money isn’t the way to make African American lives better. Lyndon Johnson said that he was finally making amends for slavery when he set up welfare.
Having a working economy is the best way to get people out of the cycle of poverty.
But the difference in outcome isn’t necessarily just due to economics, there can also be genetic variations.
Native American men have far lower rates of lung cancer than Caucasian men even though their rates of poverty are far higher and they smoke far more.
Other factors may be at play, a more physically affectionate culture might have a worse outcome because those infected start out with a higher viral load than a more reserved culture.
Simply put, the data isn’t in yet.
But Ocasio-Cortez’s solution to every problem is broad sweeping social change when actual solutions are far simpler and don’t require a socialist revolution.
For instance, local communities could implement food delivery for at-risk populations, charities should try and give masks to vulnerable communities and states should try to make sure that hospitals in African American and elderly communities have adequate medical resources.
This is the time for Americans to stand together and try to make all those at risk get the help they need to stay safe.
