I MISSED THIS WHEN IT HAPPENED–DIVERSITY NONSENSE COST TENS OF THOUSANDS OF LIVES!: Moderna Slows Coronavirus Vaccine to Ensure Minority Representation.

This is particularly egregious because apparently Moderna felt the need to ensure sufficient representation of Hispanic Americans. Even if you buy the dubious notion that there is a significant chance that vaccines will have significantly different effects by “race,” what race are Hispanics supposed to be, exactly? The average American Hispanic is about 3/4 European by descent, based on DNA studies. Essentially, then, Moderna allowed tens of thousands of people to die to ensure that “enough” white people who happen to have Spanish-speaking ancestors were included.

Like many stupidities, the very unscientific focus in biomedical research on American racial categories is the product of government policy. Even if you believe in “race” as a biological concept likely to have significant medical salience, our American civil rights/affirmative action categories don’t make any sense in that regard, e.g., putting Caucasian people from India in the same “racial” category as East Asians such as Chinese and Austronesians such as Filipinos. A chapter of my in-progress book on American racial classification (preview here) will discuss this in detail, but a shorter version can be found here. [BTW, if we have any readers with relevant medical/scientific expertise who would be interested in “peer reviewing” my chapter, please let me know.]

Serious question: Why did I only hear about this today? Why wasn’t there mass outrage when this was reported in September?