Politics

Whites to the rear? Biden admin guidance says ‘race or ethnicity’ a factor in prioritizing COVID treatment

January 9, 2022 | | Print Article

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Thanks, it appears, specifically to guidance from the Biden administration, rules prioritizing the medical treatment of non-white COVID patients over white COVID patients are “spreading” to more states than just New York and Texas.

Last week word emerged that the New York State Department of Health has issued new guidelines listing non-white “race” as a valid prerequisite risk factor for COVID patients seeking the use of monoclonal antibody treatments.

The ruling essentially means that all non-white COVID patients are automatically eligible for the treatment protocol. Their white counterparts, on the other hand, have to satisfy other prerequisites — being over 65, being unvaccinated, etc.

This means, in effect, that a healthy 16-year-old black boy will receive priority treatment over, say, a 64-year-old white man.

A similar policy was observed two months ago in Texas, where a white man under 65 recorded himself being denied monoclonal antibody treatments “because of my race.” The video showed a Texas hospital healthcare telling him point-blank that had he been black or Hispanic, the treatment wouldn’t have been denied.

It’s since been discovered that similar policies have been established in Utah and Minnesota.

Over in the Beehive State, guidelines published in September state that monoclonal antibody eligibility is to be determined through a point system where being non-white is worth two points, but suffering from shortness of breath, coronary artery disease, hypertension or a number of other conditions is worth only one.

(Source: Utah Department of Health)

And over in Minnesota, guidelines issued late last month directed healthcare workers to “consider heightened risk of progression to severe COVID-19 associated with race and ethnicity when determining eligibility for mAbs.”

In justifying this policy, the Minnesota Department of Health pointed to the guidance of the Biden Food and Drug Administration.

“The FDA has acknowledged that in addition to certain underlying health conditions, race and ethnicity ‘may also place individual patients at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19.’ FDA’s acknowledgment means that race and ethnicity alone, apart from other underlying health conditions, may be considered in determining eligibility for mAbs,” the guidelines state.

(Source: Minnesota Department of Health)

This shout-out to the Biden administration appears to be no coincidence.

Fox News suggests that the racial essentialist framework being adopted by states left and right may originate with a monoclonal antibody guidance fact sheet published by the FDA for healthcare providers nationwide.

In listing the risk factors to be considered, the fact sheet does, to the FDA’s credit, focus primarily on traditional factors such as age, pregnancy, heart condition, etc. However, it also explicitly states that “[o]ther medical conditions of actors (for example, race or ethnicity) may also place individual patients at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19.”

Fox News notes that the guidance sheet was last updated in December. It’s not clear when the guidance sheet was originally published, though the document itself does appear to show revisions dating as far back as September.

(Source: FDA)

As disturbing as these findings certainly are, they’re not surprising. Since day one, the Biden administration has been clear in its support for racial essentialist policies that favor certain races (primarily blacks and Hispanics) over all other races (primarily whites, though Asians at times too).

It all stems with this Democrat administration’s fixation on “equity,” an arguably Marxist concept that calls for equal outcomes, not equal opportunities. This fixation has, unfortunately, spread from the federal government down to state and even city governments.

In New York City, for instance, last month the Taskforce on Racial Inclusion & Equity “prioritized the distribution of COVID-19 testing kits” by establishing 13 testing sites on “Staten Island’s racially diverse North Shore” but none on “the mostly white South Shore,” as reported by the New York Post.

The idea was basically that because more black people have died from COVID, testing opportunities should be denied to whites to even things out.

Writing for the Post, commentator Betsy McCaughey noted quite bluntly that “[i]f you’re the wrong race, the push for health-care ‘equity’ could kill you.”

She was not wrong.

In fact, early last year the Biden administration considered even doling out vaccines by race. Below is a tweet from Sen. Ed Markey, a Democrat, encouraging this very plan by citing “equity”:

So-called “public health experts” also backed the plan.

“Having a racial preference for a Covid-19 vaccine is not only ethically permissible, but I think it’s an ethical imperative,” Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told Stat News at the time.

“The reason is both because of historic structural racism that’s resulted in grossly unequal health outcomes for all kinds of diseases, and because Covid-19 has so disproportionately impacted the lives of people of color.”

The only reason the Biden administration rejected the idea was because of furious backlash. It’ll likely take the same level of backlash to stop the administration from encouraging states to prioritize monoclonal antibodies by race as well.

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Vivek Saxena
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