In honor of Martin Luther King day we are happy to report that the public outrage over several states using race as a determining factor for who gets vital COVID-19 treatments is getting results.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a nonprofit public interest firm, was quickly on the case against legalized discrimination in distributing medical care. SSM Health, a St. Louis-based health care system with 23 hospitals, assigned seven points out of a minimum of 20 points to get treatment if they were Hispanic. The Institute won.
Law and Liberty praised the decision in a statement:
“A patient’s race is not a disease, symptom, or co-morbidity,” said lawyer Dan Lennington. “It’s amazing that we even need to say it, but doctors should treat the individual patient, not the skin color.”
The battle isn’t over. Other states such as New York and Minnesota are still making race-based treatment decisions and other states could follow because the practice appears to be the official guidance policy of the federal Food and Drug Administration when it comes to distributing monoclonal antibodies and other antiviral medicines.
Apparently, we still have a long way to go before we judge people by “the content of their character, not the color of their skin.”