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Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

Those numbers aren't measuring the same thing as the ones quoted in the article, so you really can't use the one set to say much about the other.

It's a bit like trying to say that 4 square meters is less than 6 cubic feet, just based on the numbers alone. It's nonsensical, because units do matter. Perhaps both those figures could play a part in an interesting comparison, depending on what they're actually measuring, but, even if they could, you'd need to bring in some more numbers to get there.

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Whites are more vaccinated, percent wise, therefore "Vaccine rejection is higher among whites than it is among black and Hispanic Americans".

How do you go from one to the other here?

I don’t think you understand those charts on the CDC website. Did you notice that the bars for, eg, fully vaccinated add up to 100 across all groups? Did you look at the table?

Because you're talking about two different things.

The vaccine rejection rate here is the percentage of people who say they won't get the vaccine. That has little to do with how many people have been vaccinated up to this point, which is a function of access and distributed among people who _haven't_ stated categorically they won't get it.

It can both be true that white people are more likely to say they won't ever get the vaccine than black and hispanic people AND that a higher percentage of white people have received vaccine shots SO FAR.

The percentage of vaccinated people who are white is not the same thing as the percentage of white people who are vaccinated.

Here, imagine you can divide a box into four quadrants:

   A | B
   --+--
   C | D

One is measuring A/(A+B), the other is measuring A/(A+C).

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