Racial Essentialism Corrupts Medicine

Racial Essentialism Corrupts Medicine

eye on the news

Racial Essentialism Corrupts Medicine

Minnesota has joined New York in using race to determine access to life-saving Covid treatments. 

January 7, 2022

The progressive Left is openly attempting to codify racial categories into education, culture, law—and now medicine. New York State has authorized health-care providers to include race in a set of risk factors to determine who qualifies for the limited quantity of life-saving Covid-19 treatments. New York City’s official guidance to providers also reads: “Longstanding systemic health and social inequities may contribute to an increased risk of getting sick and dying from COVID-19.” As a result, health-care providers in the city will now “consider race and ethnicity when assessing individual risk,” prioritizing nonwhite patients over their white counterparts.

Skin color is far too broad a category to offer any meaningful insight at the individual level. Using race as a proxy to assess an individual’s risk would make sense only if there were evidence that it genetically puts one at higher risk of severe Covid. No such evidence exists. The virus does not appear to selectively target those of African descent, for example. African countries generally have far lower Covid death rates than Western ones.

Of course, the New York Health Department is not claiming otherwise. Under the influence of woke ideology, it is using oversimplified racial categories to correct for alleged systemic inequities that fall along racial lines. On progressive thinking, this compromising of medical practice allegedly achieves a greater social good. Racial prioritization is not perfect, say progressives, but it is justified on a group level since whites have better outcomes than “people of color” in the aggregate.