No white person can speak to issues of persecution? I forget that the Jews were never persecuted. Or gays. It's easy to be Hindu in America. And I can get any job in the arts I want to support my family. Sure...

Feel free to extend your brand of prejudicial racism against me without knowing anything about who I am. I honestly don't care because this is about the virus. The virus doesn't care about race. All the virus wants is hosts, and we are ALL hosts. All eight billion of us on our shared, colorful planet, regardless of genealogy or the historical and arbitrary borders we were born into.

There are two solutions to the worldwide pandemic:

Vaccination. We all vaccinate and we are no longer toxic to each other. Life resumes.

Or herd immunity. We all get the disease and 5% of us our lost. We experienced that route in 1918: 500 million people were infected and 50 million people died. We also experienced that last year. No one wanted to be in that 5% so we locked ourselves up, businesses closed, supply chains failed and the medical system was completely overrun.

I don't think any of that was particularly beneficial to people of color, either.

I lost one person in April 2020 from Covid and it was, and continues to be, devastating. One person. And if he had a chance to spare his family and friends their suffering, if he could have stopped the disease from spreading to everyone he encountered, and they encountered, and they encountered, he wouldn't have hesitated one second to put that shot in his arm.

My choice to vaccinate has a potentially infinitesimal health affect on one person: Me. I accept that risk because a choice not to vaccinate has the potential to kill 400 million people through the spread. I lost one. I can't imagine the selfish thought process that allows anyone to risk another ONE, let alone 400 million.

I read your words and I understand what you are saying. You are heard, and I agree that the systematic abuse to the disenfranchised, indigenous and vulnerable is disgusting and reprehensible and it has to stop. The difference here is every single one of those people who is denied access is actually fully empowered to make a choice for him/her/they's own self. No one is being denied the vaccine based on any racist lens. And everyone can go to the library after a vaccination. EVERY ONE.

You are a proud Latino professional who stands up for your people. That's wonderful. But you're not standing up for anyone who is being denied anything by government or corporations or any other entity that makes the rules this time around. You are standing up for people who are making the selfish choice to continue to infect the rest of the world.

PS: Please stop polarizing with your "for us or against us" rhetoric. If you don't want a black and white world consider why YOU continue to define it that way.