The portion of the U.S. population fully vaccinated against COVID-19 rose
from 0% at the outset of 2021 to 63% by the end of the year. Yet, the CDC
recently estimated that average U.S. life expectancy fell
by 0.9 years in 2021. This is in addition to a 1.8 year decline in 2020 — and contrary to predictions that COVID vaccines could
reverse this carnage.
Nevertheless, a New York Times article by
Roni Caryn Rabin blames this “historic setback” mainly
on a lack of COVID-19 vaccination and not enough “behavioral measures to
prevent infections, such as wearing masks,” especially among “white populations.”
Her supposed evidence of this is the following claims from Dr. Steven Woolf,
director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth
University:
While other high-income countries were also hard hit in
2020, the first year of the pandemic, most had begun to recover by last year, he
said. …
Those countries had more successful vaccination campaigns
and populations that were more willing to take behavioral measures to prevent
infections, such as wearing masks, he said, adding: “The U.S. is clearly an
outlier.” …
“The white population did worse in 2021 than communities of
color, besides Native American and Alaska Natives,” Dr. Woolf said. “I think
that’s very telling: It reflects the greater efforts by Black and Hispanics to
get vaccinated, to wear masks and take other measures to protect themselves,
and the greater tendency in white populations to push back on those behaviors.”
Other than the U.S. being an outlier when it comes to
falling life expectancy in 2021, the rest of those claims are demonstrably
false.
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