National Academies Report Prioritizes Criminals Next to Nursing Home Patients for Vaccine
National Academies Report Prioritizes Criminals Next to Nursing Home Patients for Vaccine
By Daniel Greenfield
I’m going to have a lot more on this in an article coming this week, but here’s a brief look at the priorities guiding the vaccine rollout strategy.
The CDC and NIH turned to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to produce a report laying out vaccine priorities. The report is already guiding vaccine policies in multiple states.
Here’s one notable point in the report.
Phase 1a prioritizes front line workers in hospitals and nursing homes. Not nursing home patients themselves, even though they were the most affected by the pandemic.
The argument here is that the workers were often the ones who infected them anyway, except that they’ve already let it slip that prioritizing these workers is about equity and racial justice.
Phase 1a should at least have been both nursing home patients and front line workers.
Instead, nursing home residents get dumped into phase 1b alongside…criminals.
“Phase 1b covers approximately 10 percent of the population and includes people of all ages with comorbid and underlying conditions… also included in this phase are older adults (age 65 and over) living in congregate or overcrowded settings including nursing homes, long-term care facilities, homeless shelters, group homes, prisons, or jails.”
Not only isn’t NASEM proposing that nursing home residents be prioritized, it’s dumping them in with homeless and criminals.
This is horrible and evil. It’s also a consequence of social justice politics.
As I noted last week, Democrats and the media have whined endlessly about the coronavirus threat to criminals while covering up the nursing home death tolls. Meanwhile the actual disparity is huge.
The state Health Department numbers show there have been 46,545 resident cases of COVID-19 in nursing and personal care homes across Pennsylvania. Among employees, there are 8,514 diagnosed cases. That brings the entire total to 55,059 cases at nursing or personal care facilities. Out of total deaths, 8,047 have occurred in residents at nursing or personal care facilities.
The statewide death toll has risen to 13,608.
The CCJ report used data through Nov. 13, when 17 people total died of COVID-19 in state prisons. By Dec. 17, the number of deaths grew to 49.
Or as the Philly Inquirer calls this, a “death sentence”.
So far 149 federal inmates, out of 124,538 total, have died from the virus.
Or as CBS News called the 100th federal prison death back in July, a “grim milestone”.
The Los Angeles Times breathlessly reported last month that the 79th prison inmate had died of the virus in California. As of now, the number appears to be up to 88. Another “grim milestone”.
The Chicago Sun Times agonized last month that an 8th inmate had died in the Cook County jail from the virus. That’s a weekend’s worth of shootings in Chiraq by the same cast of criminals that Illinois and Cook County had dumped back on the streets to rob, rape, and kill.
But sure, prioritize the population of aging serial killers for the vaccine. As Obama would say, “it’s who we are”. And by “we”, he means the Left.