Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told The View that the coronavirus is apparently socially conscious. She said that “inequality is a preexisting condition” when it comes to the impact of the disease on minority communities.
“You can’t just go to someone and tell them, ‘Hey. You should have had health care this whole time when you’re working an hourly job and your employer doesn’t give it to you,’” she said. I don’t recall a lot of people blaming sick people for getting sick, but what do I know compared to her? And since the virus strikes everyone — whether you have health insurance or not — her point is silly.
“When a pandemic like this hits or even any natural disaster like a hurricane, like what we saw in hurricane Katrina or hurricane Maria, they don’t happen in a vacuum,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “[T]hey happen when communities are disproportionately located on the front line. Here in New York City, about 55% of our front line workers, including grocery store workers, delivery workers and more, are black and brown.”
“It’s tragic, but it is also no surprise that it’s impacting the vulnerable the most,” she said.
There are reasons that the coronavirus is hitting minority people disproportionately and they have nothing to do with skin color. It has a lot more to do with individuals following CDC guidelines than with them having health insurance or not. Black and brown people are not more susceptible to the virus because of their race and it’s simpleminded foolishness to say otherwise.
A lot more old people have died than grocery store workers. It’s tragic when anyone dies, of course, but only a radical liberal would seek to advance a political agenda using their dead bodies. ABC News:
[Ocasio-Cortez] told co-host Joy Behar that the federal response to coronavirus is an argument toward Democratic socialism, saying that everyone needs equal access to health care.
“Everyone wants to fight against these policies until they have been personally impacted,” she said. “I think that vulnerability, that personal vulnerability, really brings a lot of people around, and what we’re seeing right now is that guaranteeing health care in this country is not about giving charity to people. It affects all of us.”
It’s no accident that government-run nursing homes have become death traps during the coronavirus pandemic. The notion that if the government had been in charge of our health care system that things would have been better is demonstrably false. In fact, it’s dishonest for AOC to make that point because she knows better.
Being poor brings its own set of health problems but the virus doesn’t care how much money you have or whether some people have more money than others. Not everything in the United States is about race unless someone deliberately chooses to make it so.
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