Everyone knows that Governor Cuomo’s nursing home policies were responsible for at least a thousand unnecessary deaths of New York seniors. In New Jersey, Governor Murphy’s record is the second worst in the country in terms of keeping the elderly safe.

New data now show that these two Democratic governors also rank worst in the country in protecting minorities from COVID. According to racial composition data from the Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project through January 2021, the COVID death rates for blacks in New York and New Jersey were more than 300 per 100,000 blacks in the state.

These were by far the highest black death rates and nearly triple the national average of about 100 deaths per 100,000 blacks.

Here’s one way of measuring how poorly Messrs. Cuomo and Murphy performed. A black man living in New York or New Jersey was at least six times more likely to die from COVID than a black man living in Utah or Vermont. Blacks in NY and NJ were about five times more likely to die than blacks in West Virginia.

One might think that this high black death rate in these two states is attributable to the first wave of the virus hitting the northeast earlier and harder than other states. Were that true then the death rate in these two states would be high (which it is), but the ratio of white deaths to black deaths in New York and New Jersey would be roughly the same as the black/white death rate in other states.

It isn’t. It’s much higher. The state with the widest racial gap between white and black death rates was New York, with blacks dying at nearly two and a half times the rate of whites in the state. That was the worst rate of mortality inequality of any state in the nation. In New Jersey, blacks died at a 30% higher rate, a ratio that ranks eighth worst in the nation.

What is the policy lesson? It’s not my purpose to suggest that either Mr. Cuomo or Mr. Murphy is a racist. They’re not. Even so, not only did the COVID response policies in New York and New Jersey trigger nearly the deepest and longest economic contraction and unemployment problems in the country, but they also failed to keep safe and healthy the most vulnerable people in the population. Seniors, the poor, and minorities.

If Messrs. Cuomo and Murphy were Republican governors, they would surely be pilloried as systemic racists for their COVID policies. The pandemic reminds us to beware of such a false diagnosis.

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Mr. Moore is a senior fellow at FreedomWorks and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.