> Yes, this theory was always ridiculous. Like many other things we hear from the prestige media, it barely merits an eye-roll, let alone a full refutation. Nevertheless, I appreciate Bruenig taking the time.
I don't think that's fair. I find Bruenig's analysis reductive. It doesn't even look at Black vaccine hesitancy over time, which a halfway decent analysis would have done. What you see is that there is high hesitancy early on, and that hesitancy drops faster than many other groups as time progresses. It could be the case that skepticism, given the history of healthcare and the Black community, drove initial hesitancy, and then that waned as people saw millions of others do just fine. Bruenig's analysis would entirely miss that.
He also takes a huge leap in equating skepticism of healthcare more broadly in the Black community with skepticism of the vaccine in particular. There are so, so many assumptions he is just completely skating past here. E.g., it could entirely be the case that there is broad skepticism of healthcare in the Black community at all educational levels because of issues that persist to this very day (e.g. it's pretty well known that many people working in healthcare believe Black people are less susceptible to physical pain than white people). So, it's entirely plausible that you can start with a higher level of skepticism with respect to anything healthcare related within the Black community (e.g. because of both historical and/or current problems), but see decreasing vaccine hesitancy as education levels increase (e.g. because that correlates with better understanding of the vaccines and the trials it goes through). All of this would be entirely consistent with the data Bruenig presents, but would be entirely inconsistent with his conclusions.
What I am fundamentally getting at is that his analysis is reductive, and could potentially be explained by scenarios that are 100% counter to his conclusion.