False claims propel a battle over who gets COVID treatments

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Fri, 2022-02-11 12:15 — mike kraft

Former Trump adviser falsely claims states are rationing scarce covid treatments based largely on race Minnesota and Utah revised their policies under pressure, although experts experts dispute that Whites were denied antiviral drugs based on racial criteria. Salvador Rizzo Washington Post

When Minnesota and Utah health officials started using race as a factor to determine who would get scarce covid-19 treatments, they were hailed for their efforts to bridge the pandemic’s deadly racial divide.

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Now those officials are center stage of the nation’s latest battle over race, identity and equity, after they rolled back their policies under pressure from conservatives and a group led by Stephen Miller, a top adviser to former president Donald Trump.

Miller’s fledgling group, America First Legal, also is suing New York in federal court to get it to remove race as one of many selection criteria for outpatient antiviral treatments, saying the state’s policy discriminates against Whites despite data showing that most of the medicines go to people in that group. On Monday, the group filed legal papers seeking to declare all non-Hispanic Whites in New York a legal class facing urgent harm from the state’s health guidance.

Misinformation about these policies — relayed in Miller’s lawsuit, Trump’s remarks at a recent rally and on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News — has energized the conservative base and contributed to the cancellation of some of the policies, experts said.

Hospitalization and death rates from covid-19 have cumulatively been higher for minorities throughout the pandemic. Minnesota and Utah officials say these racial disparities remain concerning, even if the states no longer use race as one of the factors to help decide which patients take priority when outpatient antiviral treatments are scarce.

The reality in these states shifted rapidly after prominent conservatives began to claim it was Whites who were facing discrimination. A machinery of outrage, false claims and legal threats followed — and within days, Minnesota and Utah had rewritten their guidance, removing race from the scoring systems they use to ration scarce outpatient treatments such as antiviral pills and monoclonal antibodies. State officials denied making the changes under pressure. ...

The risk of death from covid-19 over the course of the entire pandemic was 60 percent higher for Black people and 90 percent higher for Native Americans compared with Whites, and 80 percent higher for Hispanics compared with non-Hispanics, based on cumulative data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that was adjusted for age by The Washington Post.

Shortages of the antiviral treatments that work against the omicron variant of the coronavirus have forced uncomfortable questions about which patients go first and what selection criteria should be used. Generally, states give precedence to older, pregnant or immunocompromised patients who are most likely to suffer severe disease and potentially die from infections, but these policies vary. ...

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