A nation run on identity politics is a genocidal and ethnocidal nightmare that’s worse than you can imagine or believe. And, as usual, California leads the way.

When Virginia Hedrick first heard about the coronavirus circulating on cruise ships off the coast of California back in March, it made her think back to some of the first ships of European settlers that arrived on American shores centuries ago, also teeming with disease.

“So some would say that it was an unintentional spread of infectious disease upon contact. Others would say it was absolutely intentional,” says Hedrick, a member of the Yurok tribe who grew up on a reservation in Humboldt County.

The coronavirus came from China, not Europe. But I’m glad that while it’s unacceptable to accuse Asian people of spreading disease, it’s okay to frame white people in general and Orthodox Jews specifically as spreading the virus.

“When we think about the historical injustice of this nation, of California, isn’t now the time to say that for the first time we prioritized Indigenous people?” she says. “We started to make reparations in the way that we handled and treated the Indigenous people of this continent?”

Apparently killing white people the best form of reparations.

The state asked more than 70 organizations to join the Community Vaccine Advisory Committee to help develop an equitable vaccine distribution plan, including the Sacramento-based policy advocacy organization Hedrick runs, the California Consortium for Urban Indian Health.

There are a few actual medical groups, but most are identity politics organizations, along with the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. 

At the first meeting of the committee on Nov. 25, Hedrick introduced the idea of considering historical injustice as a factor in deciding which groups would be next to get the vaccine after health care workers. At the second meeting a few days later, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, the state’s surgeon general and a co-chair of the committee, said: We heard you.

“We, of course, want to be evidence based. We, of course, want to use the highest standards of rigor,” she told the group. “And at the same time, we want to reflect what we’re hearing from this group.”

Rather than defining equity as everyone having a “fair opportunity to attain their full potential,” as the World Health Organization does, Burke Harris instead proposed adopting a definition from the U.S. Office of Minority Health, which says achieving health equity requires “efforts to address avoidable inequalities and historical and contemporary injustices.”

“Being fair, being equitable, I think that’s a noble societal goal,”  Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown University, says. “We just have to do it smart and keep the courts out of it.”

Gostin, along with Harald Schmidt, had co-authored a paper titled, “Is It Lawful and Ethical to Prioritize Racial Minorities for COVID-19 Vaccines?” which indeed calls for being “smart”.

 A vaccine distribution formula, therefore, could lawfully prioritize populations based on factors like geography, socioeconomic status, and housing density that would favor racial minorities de facto, but not explicitly include race.

Harald Schmidt was less smart and attracted conservative attention with this quote in the New York Times.

Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities.

“Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

This is what actual historical injustice looks like.