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NYC Is Turning COVID Treatment Into A Racial Hunger Games

black person wearing a face mask
Image CreditGift Habeshaw/Pexels

We might not have a shortage of these treatments today, but what happens when we do?

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New York City is turning health care into a veritable “Hunger Games” as the race of its citizens is becoming a major consideration in the distribution of life-saving coronavirus drugs.

In this iteration of the sadistic experiment, the NYC “game-makers” are working to manipulate the arena to advantage racial minorities and disadvantage others. They call it “equity” to cover up its real name: racial discrimination. Of course, it’s also a gross violation of medical ethics.

New York City will “[c]onsider race and ethnicity when assessing individual risk,” the city’s Department of Health has ordered, “as longstanding systemic health and social inequities may contribute to an increased risk of getting sick and dying from COVID-19.”

This guidance applies to the distribution of oral antivirals, such as Paxlovid and Molnupiravir, as well as monoclonal antibody treatments. The latter had prevented more than a thousand hospitalizations and more than 500 deaths as of October, according to the city.

The consequences are already beginning to manifest. A doctor in Staten Island told The New York Post he filled two prescriptions for an oral antiviral this week, but before the treatment was authorized, the pharmacist asked him to disclose the race of his patients.

“In my 30 years of being a physician I have never been asked that question when I have prescribed any treatment,” the doctor said. “The mere fact of having to ask this question is a slippery slope.”

The new guidance follows a pronouncement from the state Department of Health last week concerning “times of resource limitations,” which said that “[n]on-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor,” such as age, weight, and other underlying conditions. This is an obvious failure that intentionally confuses those actually at risk with those who are being propped up for show.

But if you’re part of the New York government, you know what’s more important than saving human lives? Social justice posturing and pretending you care about how the virus is affecting black Americans.

It’s so much more important, in fact, that rather than focus on real risk factors for COVID, New York City has declared racism the real public health crisis. The more recent race-based COVID guidelines have only logically followed from the “crisis” resolution passed by the city Board of Health in October.

“Why do some nonwhite populations develop severe disease and die from Covid-19 at higher rates than whites?” asked Dr. Dave A. Chokshi, the department’s commissioner, when the public health crisis declaration was made. “Underlying health conditions undoubtedly play a role. But why are there higher rates of hypertension, diabetes and obesity in communities of color? The answer does not lie in biology. Structural and environmental factors such as disinvestment, discrimination, and disinformation underlie a greater burden of these diseases in communities of color.”

First of all, right there is the admission that COVID fatality among nonwhite Americans is not about biology. So why would doctors, nurses, and pharmacists be instructed to consider it when distributing coronavirus treatment?

Second, the white savior complex or general paternalism oozing out of New York City leaders is so palpable you can almost reach out and smack it. The idea that obesity and other lifestyle-induced comorbidities are more a result of abstract racism than of human decision-making and agency has got to be the least scientific and least medical opinion to emerge since the “clump of cells” lie. It’s absurd.

“I have not seen [race] as one of the risk factors for severe disease and death,” Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard epidemiologist and professor, told The New York Post. “The reason that a lot of African Americans have died in New York — which is true — is because the rich people and more affluent were working from home while the working class were exposed.”

“The lockdowns have discriminated against minorities. Basically they have discriminated against the working class, and minorities are a bigger proportion of the working class.” Kulldorff added.

How about that? It isn’t an airborne, endemic virus nor ill-defined racism that’s harmed non-white demographics. It’s the government’s heavy-handed and immoral interventions.

“It is not ethical to triage medical care on the basis of race, no matter which race is favored,” Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University, told The Federalist. “The sad part of this story is that there would have been less acute need to triage if NY had not created an artificial staff shortages in health care settings by imposing vaccine mandates, even on staff who were COVID recovered and posed less risk of spreading COVID to their patients than the vaccinated. … The state should have spent the last few months building health care capacity, rather than undermining it.”

The twisted irony though is that these elitist interventions themselves are a form of racial and economic segregation and discrimination.

For one example, look no further than New York City’s very own vaccine mandate, which requires residents to flash a proof of vaccination to go about normal human activities such as eating and working out (a key to warding off severe COVID, by the way).

As of August, after NYC decided to start requiring these vaccine passports, The New York Times reported that while 52 percent of white New Yorkers age 18-44 were fully vaccinated, that number dropped to 48 percent of Latino residents, and a mere 28 percent of black residents. This policy has had an outsized and obvious negative effect on black Americans, thanks to the same class of city leaders that declare racism a public health crisis.

Considering people’s skin color when distributing life-saving drugs is not only a dangerous trajectory but also pretty racist. And while we might not have a shortage of these treatments today, what happens when we do?