Lt. Governor makes unfounded claims
Time for Change in the State Capitol
Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick continue their assault on the black community. Abbott finally got his quorum in the state legislature and will implement the most draconian voter suppression agenda in the United Staes. Instead of focusing on the health and well being of all Texans the duo is blocking public health policies that would save lives.
The lieutenant governor blamed rising hospitalization and death rates from COVID-19 on unvaccinated Black people — comments that were quickly denounced as racist.
Lt. Governor Patrick made the remarks last Thursday night on a Fox News segment in response to question about the latest coronavirus surge in Texas. The state is seeing its highest hospitalization rates since January as the highly contagious delta variant spreads. “The biggest group in most states are African Americans who have not been vaccinated,” Patrick said.
Patrick did not change course Friday, saying “Democrat social media trolls” misstated facts and that he had used state data in his assertions. His office did not respond to a request for additional comments.
Statistics from the Texas Department of State Health Services don’t back that. Black people — who make up about 12% of the more than 29 million people in Texas — accounted for about 15% of total COVID-19 cases and just more than 10% of deaths. Patrick also told Fox News that Democrats were to blame for low vaccination rates among Black people, who frequently support that party, even though he believes Republicans should persuade more people to get their shots, too. But he also tiptoed around that issue, which has been sensitive for the GOP.
“But we respect the fact that if people don’t want the vaccination, we’re not going to force it on them,” Patrick said. “That’s their individual right.” Abbott and Patrick continue to talk out of both sides of their mouths. They believe in individual freedoms when it suits their agenda. Masks mandates interfere with individual freedom, but voter suppressions laws do not. Go figure!
City and county officials in Texas — many of whom are in ongoing legal battles with state government over mask mandates — met Patrick with swift rebukes. “The Lt. Governor’s statements are offensive and should not be ignored,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, who is Black, said on Twitter. Rodney Ellis, a Black commissioner for the county that encompasses Houston, tweeted that Patrick’s comments were “racist and flat out wrong.” “It’s disappointing that the Lt. Governor would rather scapegoat Black people than do the right thing and work with local government to help control the spread of COVID-19,” Ellis wrote.
About 8% of the total number of people in Texas who have been fully vaccinated are Black, according to state data. It’s unclear from state data what percentage of the African American population has been vaccinated. Overall, 44% of Texans are fully vaccinated, less than the national rate of about 50%. COVID-19 is blamed for more than 50,000 deaths in the state, and more than 600,000 across the U.S.
Failures and abuses on behalf of government — including the “Tuskegee syphilis study,” in which unsuspecting Black men were used as guinea pigs in a study of a sexually transmitted disease — have led to mistrust in public institutions for many African Americans. Gary Bledsoe, president of the Texas State NAACP Conference, said those historic disparities combined with the politicization of vaccines, misinformation and access to shots is the problem. Bledsoe said he was “shocked” by Patrick’s comments. “I am so concerned that he is going to give field to somebody to go out there and do something outrageous because they think someone in their community got infected by Black people. That is just not true,” Bledsoe said. “Reach out beyond your political base, reach out to people of all the political persuasions in Texas, all the races and religions, and say, ‘Let’s come together,’ because this is a major problem.”
The seven-day rolling average of daily deaths from COVID-19 in Texas has risen over the past two weeks from 50.29 deaths per day on Aug. 4 to 115.14 deaths per day on Aug. 18, according to data from Johns Hopkins University Center. This is not the first time that Patrick has been criticized for comments related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In an April 2020 appearance on Fox News, Patrick said the U.S. should get back to work in the face of the pandemic and that people over the age of 70, who the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says are at higher risk for severe illness from the coronavirus, will “take care of ourselves.”
Patrick’s comments sparked immediate outrage, including from a fellow Republican, Allen West, and from within the Senate that he oversees. Sen. Borris Miles, a Black Democrat from Houston, released a statement Friday morning saying that “for the second time in the past month, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick has made prejudiced, inflammatory statements about African Americans and that are unacceptable.” Miles was among several Black politicians from Houston who got vaccinated at a news conference late last year, hoping to set an example for their communities.
Patrick issued a statement Friday afternoon responding to the uproar, saying, “Not surprisingly, Democrat social media trolls were up late misstating the facts and fanning the flames of their lies.”
There are an estimated 5.6 million white people who are eligible and unvaccinated, while the same figure is 1.9 million for Black people, who make up a far smaller part of the overall population. The figure is 4.9 million for Hispanic people, whose population is now nearly as large as the non-Hispanic white population in Texas. Also despite Patrick’s claims, vaccine hesitancy is higher among Republicans than it is among Black people in Texas, according to a June poll from The Texas Tribune and the University of Texas at Austin. Thirty-eight percent of Republicans said they would not get a vaccine as soon as it is available to them, while 18% of Black people said the same.
Patrick’s Democratic challenger for reelection, Mike Collier, also responded to the Fox News interview, saying in a statement that Patrick is “blaming Black Texans for low vaccination rates to distract from his own failures.” West, the former Texas GOP chair who is challenging Gov. Greg Abbott and who clashed with Patrick when West was at the state party, took aim at Patrick’s remarks on Twitter. He tweeted that Patrick’s comments on Fox News were “disgusting, unconscionable, utterly disturbing, and highly insulting.” West noted he is “an unvaccinated Black man in Texas.” “[Patrick] must immediately issue a statement of apology for his insidious comment,” West said.
The Terrible Two are responsible for more than 50,000 deaths overall and an additional 115 deaths per week would be cause for alarm. It is not clear that Patrick is hoping for the type of backlash that Trump created when he nicknamed the virus the China Flu. What is clear is that those in public office must be held to a higher standard. Public comments that disparage others can have serious repercussions. The pandemic, the power grid, voter suppression tactics and now racially motivated fear mongering Texans deserve better!
