August 20, 2021

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick Went on Fox News to Blame the COVID Surge on Black People

Meanwhile, communities of color—in Texas and beyond—continue to bear the brunt of the pandemic.

Fox News

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On Thursday night, as the Texas Supreme Court rebuked Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s ban on school mask mandates and Texas’ education agency temporarily backed off enforcing it, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick fled to the safe space of Fox News to blame the whole thing on—who else?!—Black people. 

“The Democrats like to blame Republicans” for the spread of the virus, Patrick told Fox’s Laura Ingraham. “Well, the biggest group in most states are African Americans who have not been vaccinated. The last time I checked, over 90 percent of them voted for Democrats…They’re doing nothing for the African American community that has a significant high number of unvaccinated people, so they need to address that.” 

 

As The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer points out, Patrick doesn’t seem to think that Republicans bear responsibility for combating the COVID surge and encouraging Black Americans in Texas, and elsewhere, to get vaccinated. But in GOP-led states like Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida, Arkansas, and Texas, lax efforts to curtail the virus’s spread and low vaccination rates have led to an uptick in cases, resulting in overburdened hospitals filled with younger patients.

Data from the Texas Department of State Health Services shows that white Texans, who make up 41 percent of the state’s residents and 38 percent of those fully vaccinated, account for roughly 32 percent of infections and 42 percent of deaths. Meanwhile, state data shows that Black and Latinx Texans are disproportionately afflicted by COVID: Black residents account for 12 percent of the state’s population but 16 percent of infections; Latinx residents account for 40 percent of residents but 46 percent of deaths. That data reinforces the fact that these communities of color continue to bear the brunt of the pandemic, as has been the case for a year and a half. 

But Patrick doesn’t see the toll the pandemic has had on Black and Latinx residents. When he goes on Fox News and says that Republicans “respect the fact that if people don’t want to get the vaccination, we’re not going to force it on them. That’s their individual right,” he’s ignoring the fact that individualism only makes it more difficult to overcome a pandemic that affects everyone. Instead, Patrick concocts a familiar racist narrative: that irresponsible Black Democrats are to blame. In doing so, he disregards the well-documented factors that just might explain why just 8 percent of Black residents and 32 percent of Latinx residents are fully vaccinated.

As I’ve previously reported, the social conditions that Black and Latinx residents find themselves in—their ability to get medical care, their working conditions as essential workers, their housing situations, among others—all influence their access to and attitudes toward vaccination. But Patrick doesn’t want to talk about the legacies of structural racism or the understandable mistrust that communities of color have for the US medical establishment.

As former Stanford University School of Medicine instructor Jorge Cabellero pointed out on Twitter, the number of unvaccinated white residents continues to far outpace the number of unvaccinated Black residents—a fact that Patrick conveniently neglects to acknowledge. Guess that’s just their individual right. 

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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