The lead story on Fox News's website on Saturday reported that the Biden administration was telling hospitals that "certain Covid patients may qualify for treatment faster based on their RACE" (emphasis original).  Earlier the same day, the Washington Free Beacon examined the story in considerable detail.

The roots of this de facto medical racism were first exposed in several articles at American Thinker by this writer, including on November 25, 2020, and on April 26, 2021.  Back then, this toxic phenomenon of providing medical treatments based on the patient's race or ethnicity was in its infancy.  Now, thanks to the power of Biden's FDA, it is going national.

As Saturday's Fox News article noted:

Guidance issued by the Biden administration states certain individuals may be considered "high risk" and more quickly qualify for monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals used to treat COVID-19 based on their "race or ethnicity."

The top of Fox News's home page, Saturday, January 8, 2021.

The lead of the Free Beacon's story was more specific:

In New York, racial minorities are automatically eligible for scarce COVID-19 therapeutics, regardless of age or underlying conditions. In Utah, "Latinx ethnicity" counts for more points than "congestive heart failure" in a patient's "COVID-19 risk score" — the state's framework for allocating monoclonal antibodies. And in Minnesota, health officials have devised their own "ethical framework" that prioritizes black 18-year-olds over white 64-year-olds — even though the latter are at much higher risk of severe disease.

The Beacon's headline and subhead pointed to the origins of this racist policy:

Food and Drug Administration Guidance Drives Racial Rationing of COVID Drugs

State triage policies cite FDA guidance to justify allocating care based on race

In my April 2021 article at AT, I noted:

President Biden's 200 page Covid-19 plan (published on Jan. 21, 2021) is filled with references to race, inequality, equity, and the need to consider "redress" in virtually every federal department and program from now on. An Executive Order by Biden established a COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force at the Department of Health and Human Services.

The roots of Biden's preoccupation with race and health care go back to the first days after the 2020 election.  As I wrote at AT on November 9, 2020, when Biden's COVID-19 Task Force was announced, one of the panel's co-chairs fits this new race preference bill perfectly:

The second panel co-chair is Marcella Nunez-Smith, M.D., who grew up in the Virgin Islands and is now a physician at the Yale University School of Medicine, where she holds a variety of titles.  Dr. Nunez-Smith specializes in race and health care and studies medicine through the prism of race, social justice, and identity politics.

As the Biden administration enters its second year in power this month, its racist medical policies have been institutionalized by administrative state fiat — thanks to the power accorded it by the COVID-19 Plandemic.  It has also been given faux intellectual cover by the world's leading medical journals, all of which have gone "woke," including the New England Journal of Medicine.  On its website, the NEJM has published a "Race and Medicine Collection" consisting of the full text of scores of recently published articles that "reflect(s) NEJM's commitment to understanding and combating racism as a public health and human rights crisis."

As I wrote in my AT article last April:

It turns out that for some time now the American medical Establishment has been laying the groundwork to focus increasingly on the alleged prominent role of racism in medical outcomes. An article in Time (April 21, 2021), for example, maintains that "a problem" is that "The World's Leading Medical Journals Don't Write About Racism." ...

The authors write:

Over the past year, rising deaths from COVID-19, police brutality, anti-Asian hate crimes, and the inequitable damage of climate breakdown, have made the manifold harms of racism easier for everyone to see. Harms that were once shielded from public consumption by segregation or shrouded from public scrutiny by stories depicting the U.S. as a nation of fairness and freedoms, are now the center of an ongoing national confrontation with racism and its impacts on health, safety, and justice.

They then link to their new article (April 20, 2021) in a major peer-reviewed journal, Health Affairs: "Medicine's Privileged Gatekeepers: Producing Harmful Ignorance About Racism And Health." In that article, the authors express concern that in their review of 200,000 articles published during the past three decades in the world's four top medical journals, only 1% of them (or about 2,000) mentioned "racism." "Just think about that," they write. The source of the problem they insist is that "nearly all of the editors and chiefs [of the four journals] have been white men."

They do see hope, however, now that Joe Biden is the president.

On March 1, the U.S. National Institutes of Health announced new initiatives to address the impacts of "structural racism on biomedical research." On April 8, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared racism "a serious public health threat."

It appears that the unprecedented power and control amassed by the establishment thanks to the politics of  COVID-19 have now encouraged the further corruption of medicine.  The elites' obsession with equity has resulted in race being employed to facilitate the backdoor introduction of the medical Death Panels that Sarah Palin and others warned us about during the debate over Obamacare in 2009.

Peter Barry Chowka has been a frequent contributor to American Thinker since 2007.  He is the permanent guest host of John B. Wells's national terrestrial radio programs Caravan to Midnight and Ark Midnight.  Peter is also a regular contributor to the BBC and a frequent guest on the Glazov Gang internet video program.