By Hans Bader | December 10, 2020 | 3:46pm EST Featured is the Department of Veterans Affairs seal. (Photo credit: Robert Alexander/Getty Images) The Department of Veterans Affairs is going to give priority to black and Hispanic veterans over white and Asian veterans when administering the vaccine for COVID-19. This racial preference is unconstitutional. The VA is doing this because it thinks blacks and Hispanics are at greater risk. But these minorities are not inherently at greater risk of contracting the virus. There is nothing special about their genes that puts them in danger. It is just that their jobs, neighborhoods, and backgrounds tend to put them in more frequent contact with people who already carry COVID-19. So it is those characteristics -- not race -- that the VA can legally consider in handing out the vaccine to veterans. As the Supreme Court explained in