The Patriot Post® · Racial Medical Rationing
First, leftists told us that minorities were hardest hit by COVID. (There’s a reason “world ends, minorities hardest hit” became a running joke with The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto years ago.) But it soon became evident that the real racism was in the Left’s response to the coronavirus. For example, due to the initial hesitancy of blacks to be vaccinated, any kind of leftist-required vaccine “passport” would be arguably racist. The Left’s “solution” was racial preferences for vaccine distribution. Now, it’s New York’s leftist COVID policy — favoring minorities over whites for treatment in violation of the state’s own constitution — that has been unmasked as racist.
“Non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor as longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19,” read the recent directive from the state Health Department, approved by Governor and “Branch Covidian” Kathy Hochul. It’s not just age, weight, and other health factors that doctors must consider when treating patients, but also skin color — which, by the way, racist leftists claim is a “risk factor.”
The result is that treatments like monoclonal antibody treatments or Pfizer’s COVID pill will now be subject to counting by race. National Review’s editorial board explains: “To be clear, white people in New York can still be prescribed these treatments if they are available. However, non-white patients are presumed, because of their non-whiteness, to suffer from social inequalities that exacerbate their likelihood of illness and death, and are therefore instantly eligible for them.”
A Health Department spokesperson explained that this policy is because minorities have “borne the brunt of this pandemic due to structural racism.” The Department’s answer to this dubious assertion is to institute structural racism in the other direction. It’s Critical Race Theory applied to medicine. It’s reparations paid with healthcare.
New York might be merely the testing laboratory for this pseudoscience. Former New York Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey warns: “Prominent medical organizations and the Biden administration are pushing for rules that will move ‘disadvantaged’ populations to the front of the line for scarce medical resources — think vaccines, ventilators, monoclonal antibody treatments. That means everyone else waits longer, in some cases too long.”
The prevalence of this new racism is a hallmark of the modern Left. And it’s a growing movement in the medical community, too. White Coats for Black Lives (WC4BL) is an organization of medical students that has a chapter at more than 70 medical schools. It’s mission statement: “To dismantle racism and accompanying systems of oppression in health, while simultaneously cultivating means for collective liberation that center the needs, priorities, and self-determination of Black people and other people of color, particularly those most marginalized in our communities.”
Evidently, medical students can get involved in “dismantling anti-Black racism, white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy” by showing up under the WC4BL banner at George Floyd protests/riots.
“White Coats for Black Lives has already had much success in its mission to transform medical education,” writes John Sailer at City Journal. “The next stop will be the medical field itself.” New York has already reached that next stop, and the Biden administration isn’t far behind.