NY State Advantaging Non-Whites For Covid Therapeutics Reflects Growing Racial Radicalization Of Medicine
This ideology of elevating race as the central focus in medical education and care is in sync with what is happening with Critical Race Theory and its variants in K-12 and higher ed. It’s all part of an ideological world view that is poisonous and has nothing to do with equality or improving care.
The New York State Department of Health has issued official “Guidance” regarding rationing scarce Covid therapeutics which gives preference to non-whites over whites in proving entitlement to the therapies. All people need to demonstrate certain health problems (like testing positive) but non-whites do not need to prove that they personally have an aggravated health risk, it is presumed. Whites, on the other hand, get no such presumption.
We covered the story on December 31, 2021, NY State Announces Racially Discriminatory Standard For Rationing COVID Therapeutic Treatment:
Citing a “significant surge” in COVID cases and “severe resource limitations”, the New York State Department of Health this week announced it would ration oral antiviral and monoclonal antibody treatments based on race:
Oral antiviral treatment is authorized for patients who meet all the following criteria (emphasis added):
- Age 12 years and older weighing at least 40 kg (88 pounds) for Paxlovid, or 18 years and older for molnupiravir
- Test positive for SARS-CoV-2 on a nucleic acid amplification test or antigen test; results from an FDA-authorized home-test kit should be validated through video or photo but, if not possible, patient attestation is adequate
- Have mild to moderate COVID-19 symptoms o Patient cannot be hospitalized due to severe or critical COVID-19
- Able to start treatment within 5 days of symptom onset
- Have a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness.
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
Based on these guidelines, non-whites do not need to show they personally are at risk for severe illness, it is presumed from their racial and ethnic status. Whites need proof, a clearly discriminatory standard.
The story has received widespread news coverage but NY officials are not backing down:
Erin Silk, a spokesperson for the New York Department of Health, told Fox News in a statement that the state’s “prioritization guidance comes directly from the CDC” and that neither “race nor ethnicity would disqualify an individual from receiving treatment.”
“Systemic poverty, which has clearly proven to be a risk factor in populations in New York State and nationwide, is added to the algorithm of prioritization similar to all other risk factors. It is merely mentioned as a factor that increases risk,” she wrote.
How can such blatant unapologetic racial discrimination be legal? It’s not, although as Prof. Jonathan Turley writes, there can be legal hurdles to similar suits.
America First Legal has sent a demand letter to NY health officials demanding they rescind the guidance. The letter reads, in part:
This letter serves as notice of potential legal action related to the blatantly unconstitutional, immoral, and racist policies of the New York State Department of Health that direct the rationing of medicine based on race and self-selected ethnicity….
* * *
You must immediately rescind these unconstitutional, unlawful, and un-American policies. They violate the Constitution and numerous federal statutes—including Title VI and section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act. If we discover that any New Yorker has been denied medicine or otherwise harmed because of your reprehensible policies, we will bring legal action to pursue all available remedies under the law. Using a patient’s skin color or ethnicity—rather than the unique and specific medical circumstances of an individual patient—as a basis for deciding who should obtain lifesaving medical treatment is appalling. The color of one’s skin is not a medical condition akin to hypertension, heart disease, or obesity, which are known to aggravate the risk of death or severe illness among those infected with COVID-19. Directing medical professionals to provide or deny medical care based on immutable characteristics like skin color, without regard to the particular health conditions of the individual patients who are seeking these life-saving antiviral treatments, is nothing more than an attempt to establish a racial hierarchy in the provision of life-saving medicine.
Rescind these egregious policies now.
As outrageous as this new guidance is, it’s also important to understand that it is part of a racialized trend in medicine in which “racial justice” interferes with and sometimes supplants patient care. And it is not new, though it has accelerated greatly in the past two years post-George Floyd, as we have documented repeatedly.
Here is a sampling of our posts:
- Students at U. Pittsburgh Medical School Add Vow Against ‘Systemic Racism’ to Hippocratic Oath (November 17, 2020)
- Investigation: Racial Identity Politics Consumes SUNY Upstate Medical University (December 8, 2020)
- Journal of American Medical Association Embraces “Structural Racism” Dogma, Succumbing To Critical Race Activism (March 27, 2021)
- American Medical Association Rejects “Equality” and “Meritocracy” In Just-Released “Racial Justice” and “Equity” Strategic Plan (May 12, 2021)
- Investigation: Medical Education And Research Crumbling Under Racial Identity Politics (August 11, 2021)
- Investigation: Increasing Push For “Prioritizing Non-Whites for Medical Care to Compensate for Historical Wrongs” (August 19, 2021)
- American Medical Association Language Guide Demands Focus On Racial “Equity” And Micromanages Terminology (October 31, 2021)
This ideology of elevating race as the central focus in medical education and care is in sync with what is happening with Critical Race Theory and its variants in K-12 and higher ed. It’s all part of an ideological world view that is poisonous and has nothing to do with equality or improving care.
The rest of the nation may be shocked at this medical racism, but Legal Insurrection readers saw it coming.
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Comments
Note that this policy would be legal if and only if there were a demonstrable direct link between being white and having enhanced immunity from this virus. If the state could show that white people are actually at lower risk from this virus than other people are, not because of some covariant factor but because melanin makes someone more vulnerable, or lack of melanin makes someone less vulnerable, then it could say that if you have this enhanced immunity you must demonstrate that you’re at heightened risk, while if you lack it then you don’t need to demonstrate it because the fact that you’re not white automatically demonstrates it.
Needless to say, this is not in fact the case.
Well, there is the Vitamin-D factor, but at this time of the year, and at this latitude, the difference is probably negligible, and, in any case, insufficient to be significant.
Excuse me but… is “advantaging” a real word?
-signed- The Pædantic Grizzly
Yes, it is. According to Merriam-Webster.com the first known use of “advantage” as a verb is from 1549.
Yes… but the best known use of Mirriam-Webster.com memory-holing and changing history to accommodate a political narrative occurred just about a year ago.
Check any other dictionary you like. On- or offline.
Somehow, in this case, I think they left things well enough alone.
Thank you. And neither one of those down ticks is mine.
In an effort to increase deaths and maintain panic mode Federal Government has cornered the market on monoclonal antibody treatments…stopping states from getting their own supplies. Then after getting all current and locking down all future supplies…reduced all shipments to states by 75% even as they beg for them…preferring to sit on them as the body count increases…
And THAT is our current government.
Arrests will be made if the words Ivermectin or Hydroxychoriquin are mentioned.
Well, I just hope it winds up in court. Let’s see how far the arguments of these neo-racist weasels gets them.
It will surely end up in court eventually, and once it does it will surely be enjoined immediately. That court case won’t last long at all. But it will take some doing to get it into court. Finding a suitable plaintiff is not a trivial task.
A dead plaintiff will be found to lack standing.
I’ve come to hate living in NY, after living here my entire life. Here’s yet another reason why.
If my special needs son didn’t live here (not much chance of moving him), neither would I.
Wish you both the best, UJ
Diversity (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry), Inequity, and Exclusion (DIE). The tell-tale hearts beat sooner and ever louder.
It is another sign that we are in fact separating into multiple nations. No, not black -v-white; but whites who would give minor advantages to the melanin-enhanced in order to leverage them for power -v- the rest of the country. It is going to be an interesting year, in the Chinese sense,
Subotai Bahadur
Let’s just get it over with, already – we’ll be MUCH happier, wealthier and safer.
Gov is white, deny her medical care of every sort.
Again… Brandeis and Marshal on Affirmative Action… Brandeis wondered how many decades until AA would be eliminated…. Marshal said “centuries”. Hint: Forced inequity doesn’t heal. A lot of the genetic traits that made survival more likely in Africa (even around the Mediterranean) ,,, trade-offs.. are detrimental in Western Civ. With no malaria, sickle cell doesn’t bestow increased survival.
Marshall was a hack of titanic proportions.
It doesn’t mean his opinion on how long race quotas would last is not a valid one.
If factors such as obesity, lack of prior medical care, dense housing, etc., are associated or correlated with minority status, there is a danger of counting such factors twice, once for the underlying medical and social factor and once for race.
This could be investigated in an objective statistical fashion to determine if there actually is double counting.
Alternatively, it could be established that racial genetics actually are their own critical factor, cf. sickle cell anemia. In which case racial distinctions could be justified.
Well, it’s just evidence that they’re racially motivated and being intentionally racist.
By stating that ‘systemic poverty’ is a risk factor they’re really telling us that poverty is a risk factor.
Fine, prioritise based on poverty. The cause of that poverty is entirely irrelevant, as is the race of the person in poverty.
But no, they’re prioritising based on race. Because they’re racists breaking the law.
Obesity is a choice. Dense housing has nothing to do with health in general aside from communicable disease and that can be dealt with. Minority status is also not a key issue if cultural deficits are mitigated. The “Projects” we’re a disaster because of how people acted.
Just wait until all of those favored POC start dropping like flies from the experimental drugs.
THEN the fun begins.
Well, the vaxed are already dropping like flies.*
What complicates the denouement here is that the POC are among the most vaccine-hesitant, so it’s going to screw us well before it screws them.
*Curiously, this news item is being reported all over the Internet, but the local Fox News link above is the sole MSM-outlet reference to it I can find. What I don’t find is any mention of the article on snopes… not that I’d believe anything they said, but the fact that they’d rather ignore it than simply declare it “debunked” in their usual fraudulent style is an interesting data point to me.
Creating a system that uses an amorphous concept like race to impose inequality based upon generalized presumptions about group attributes seems like a bad idea at first blush. If only our Nation had any historical record with setting up race based exclusionary programs to use as examples to help guide our debates regarding the adoption of race as a discriminating factor in public policy in 2022. /S
Seriously though do they use a one drop rule? What constitutes membership in a race? Who is white? Is it just English, Irish, Scotts, Germans, Dutch? Do they exclude Italians and Greeks? They better be ready to answer these questions and more. I look forward to hearing them.
A little taste of government run ‘Medicare for all.’
Wait till the death panels come to the forefront.
This is a death panel if your white
Keep in mind that for purposes such as this, those of us of
Asian ancestry count as white. [sigh]
Subotai Bahadur
Did anyone here know that Fauci’s WIFE is in on the scam?
Fauci’s wife is director of bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, and that’s a problem:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/02/when-grady-met-fauci/
So is Rachel Wollensky’s husband!!
CDC Director Walensky Didn’t Disclose Husband’s $5.3 Million in HHS Grants:
https://660amtheanswer.com/columnists/charlie-kirk/posts/cdc-director-walensky-didnt-disclose-husbands-5-3-million-in-hhs-grants
This is what happens when your state health department and a. Stand in governor who now wants to appeal to the far left base of the Democrats goes woke
This is where to find institutional racism. State sponsored.
If discrimination is wrong, and, I believe it is, all discrimination should be stopped.
Every time I hear someone bitching about “Jim Crow,” I remind them that it was government-mandated segregation, by Democratic governments, and that whites who flouted it were punished,
I do this, too! (We must be so fun at parties! Heh.) I also add that they are reinstating Democrat Wallace’s proclamation, “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”. It’s the Democrat mantra. Always was, and apparently, always will be.
Meanwhile, the non-whites continue to be the most jab-resistant group. Apparently, they don’t see themselves as being ethnically disadvantaged when it comes to experimental “vaccines”.
Africa has been a scandalous testing ground for such experiments (ebola e.g and many believe AIDS as well) by pharmaceutical companies. In the case of ebola, it was determined that the WHO strategy of universal masks and quarantine were major mistakes. NEVER quarantine the healthy and, ahem, masks don’t work.
I wonder if this has anything to do with their cynicism over these “vaccines”? They don’t work anyway so…
There has been the suspicion that in creating a polio vaccine that the process was contaminated with HIV. Years ago the cell line of renal cells used to make urokinase was contaminated with a rertrovirus. That ended that.
Probably not. The entire experience most of our “African Americans” have had with actual Africa was listening to Ladysmith Black Mambazo CDs.
These racist policies are imposed by leftist politicians to keep people divided, and divide them more — mainly to keep them from combining against the political class who are the real oppressors.
A grateful nation should give NY Gov. Hochul some kind of award. She makes it perfectly clear why single payer/socialized medicine will be a horror show.
But of course, I didn’t mean to say that punishing you for the sin of being born white isn’t the only reason single payer/socialized medicine is a bad idea. If you thought your dealing with your insurer was difficult when you have the option of going to court, imagine dealing with your insurer when it is the court.
“Pssst — hey coach, howcome all the referees are wearing the same uniform as the other team?”