Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick recently implied that African Americans were to blame for the new surge of COVID-19 cases. His comments came Thursday during his interview with Fox News.
Patrick was asked about the criticism regarding how Texas is handling the coronavirus in the state in reference to Governor Greg Abbott’s mask mandate and vaccination mandate bans.
He responded, “The Covid is spreading particularly, most of the numbers are with the unvaccinated, and the Democrats like to blame Republicans on that. 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 vote for Democrats.”
Patrick was criticized for his remarks regarding the African American population. According to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, African Americans, who are around 13 percent of the total population, are not the biggest group of unvaccinated people in Texas or any part of the United States. The Kaiser Family Foundation found Patrick’s claims are far from the truth because their study concluded that white adults accounted for the largest percentage of unvaccinated adults, CNN reported.
However, the Kaiser Family Foundation did say that African Americans made up over 50 percent of positive COVID-19 cases in two of the 35 areas they analyzed as of Aug. 16. These places include the District of Columbia and Mississippi. In Texas, African Americans only represented 15 percent of the cases, 52 percent were Hispanics, and white people accounted for 32 percent of the cases.
In response to the backlash, Patrick’s office took to Facebook to say that federal and state data indicated Black vaccination rates are lower than white or Hispanic rates. This is likewise a wrongful claim because, per the analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 65 percent of African American adults said they received at least one dose of the vaccine. For the Hispanic adults, 61 percent said they had at least one dose, and it’s at 70 percent for white adults.
