This past Saturday, I read this headline in The Wall Street Journal: “New guidelines say whites may not be eligible for antibodies and antivirals, while non-whites are.” The first two paragraphs of the op-ed read as follows:
New York state recently published guidelines for dispensing potentially life-saving monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals like Paxlovid to people suffering from mild to moderate symptoms of Covid-19. These treatments are in short supply, and they must be allocated to those most in need.
According to these guidelines, sick people who have tested positive for Covid should be eligible to receive these drugs if they have “a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness.” These include standard criteria like age and comorbidities like cancer, diabetes and heart disease—but, startlingly, they also include simply being of “non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity,” which “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.”
The authors -- John Judis, a well-regarded lifelong democratic socialist intellectual and Ruy Teixeira, a well-regarded liberal Democratic intellectual -- go on to explain that based on the evidence, race as a factor has not underpinned any disparate Covid health outcomes. Economic and educational factors have. They conclude that “There is no valid medical argument to justify New York state’s criteria.” And they continue in this vein for another few hundred words.
With each word of cogent rebuttal, they grow further from basic, essential truth. This state decree explicitly calls for allocating and implicitly calls for withholding medical care based on race. Affirmative action, which courts have held blatantly discriminatory but arguably justified to achieve goals like diversity, is now extended to life and death.
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