Joe Biden Says African-Americans and Hispanics Don't Know How to Use the Internet
Just like many aspects of America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, the left has turned the vaccine rollout into a political debate. Namely, it has spent its time prioritizing race over proven health risks in determining who should receive the vaccine first.
With his latest comment on the issue, President Joe Biden may have gone too far for his liberal allies.
“Not everybody in the Hispanic and the African-American community, particularly in rural areas that are distant and/or inner-city districts, knows how to get online to determine how to get in line for that COVID vaccination,” Biden said during a CNN town hall Tuesday night at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee.
That sure sounded like the president was saying he believes certain minority groups don’t know how to use the internet.
“Minorities… don’t know how to use, know how to get online.”@JoeBiden is perpetuating a racist trope that minorities don’t know how to use the internet.#BidenTownhall pic.twitter.com/hsVuC02PdC
— Steven Cheung (@CaliforniaPanda) February 17, 2021
Mark Dice, a conservative media analyst and author of “Hollywood Propaganda,” certainly took Biden’s comments that way.
“Joe Biden says black people and Hispanics don’t know how to use the Internet and can’t figure out where to get the vaccine,” he tweeted.
Joe Biden says black people and Hispanics don’t know how to use the Internet and can’t figure out where to get the vaccine. ?♂️ pic.twitter.com/nRXPPP9CZm
— Mark Dice (@MarkDice) February 17, 2021
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued guidelines advising states to prioritize race in their vaccine rollout plans.
“As a result, half of the nation’s states have outlined plans that now prioritize black, Hispanic and indigenous residents over white people in some way, as the vaccine rollout begins,” the Daily Mail reported in December, citing a Kaiser Family Foundation report.
In addition to the racist nature of those plans, Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro said they completely ignore science and will likely cause more deaths.
“Not only is this obviously racist, it happens to engender policy that kills more black people in absolute terms,” he said in a syndicated column in December. “Age is a far better predictor of COVID-19 vulnerability than race: As Dr. Gbenga Ogedegbe of the New York University Grossman School of Medicine found, infected patients die at the same rate regardless of race.”
“This means that if you give tranches of the vaccine to patients based on racial concerns rather than age concerns, the most vulnerable black and Latino populations — elderly black people and Latinos — are more likely to die so that younger black and Latinos can receive a vaccine for a disease to which they are probably 10 times less vulnerable.”
Once again, we see that the desire to be “woke” is blinding public health officials who care more about their image than they do about saving the most lives possible.
In an apparent attempt to defend the decision to prioritize minorities rather than the elderly, Biden has now extended racial stereotypes and suggested that minorities cannot perform simple tasks online.
The president’s claim is not only insulting but also false, according to a 2019 article by the Pew Research Center. While Hispanics and African-Americans may be less likely to own a physical computer, they “have mobile devices such as smartphones in shares similar to whites,” it said.
The Pew survey found that 82 percent of white adults, 80 percent of black adults and 79 percent of Hispanic adults said they owned a smartphone.
Furthermore, there are certainly elderly white adults who do not have internet access. If Biden had said, “There are some elderly members of our community who don’t know how to register for vaccines,” that would have been more accurate and less racist.
Instead, he overtly singled out Hispanics and African-Americans. This is yet another example of the left prioritizing identity politics over human lives.
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