How’s That Post-Racial America Working Out For You

USA contributor Michael Stern relays his tale from the Michigan COVID triage fray – a battle that is taking place everywhere around the country.

He blames anti-vaxxers for his parents’ struggle to get scheduled for the Sotrovimab, a monoclonal antibody treatment, the only monoclonal proven effective against the now-dominant Omicron variant. .

I put the bulk of the blame firmly on the anti-vaxxers. They are closely followed by the people who wear their masks as chin straps.

But doesn’t explain why – because he can’t. He just wanted to vent his ire at those who dare defy State authority. The irony of his liberal knee-jerk emotional response to his “triple-vaxxed parents” getting COVID seems entirely lost on him. Liberal logic is an oxymoron after all.

There is no discussion in the article as to whether the triage was race-based, but odds are very good if was. It’s just that most states and medical systems, unlike SSM, Minnesota and Utah were smart enough to not explicitly state as much. (See: Hospital System Backs Off Race-Based Treatment Policy After Legal Threat. Scoring rubric gave race more weight than diabetes, obesity, asthma, and hypertension combined)

Mr. Stern goes into great detail regarding how difficult it was to locate the potentially life-saving treatment for his 85 year old parents, concluding that “American health care feels like the Wild West.” Gee, I wonder if he thinks anti-vaxxers and chin-strappers are responsible for that as well?

Probably; the Obamacare schematic is lost on him

The nurse said that my mother’s age and medical condition would qualify her for the treatment, but the limited supply meant a doctor’s prescription was not enough. A referral had to be made to a group of doctors who decide which patients will be given the life-saving drug. He made the referral and assured us that we’d hear from the group that handled the treatment, within 24 hours.

Or possibly 24 days, given the COVID related labor shortages and supply chain problems. Just hang in there: you might recover on your own.

One wonders how Martin Luther King would have felt about SSM’s race based rubric used to determine eligibility for receiving the proven life-saving monoclonal antibody treatment.

The now-defunct rubric is much more radical, prioritizing healthy minorities over white patients with many of the largest risk factors for COVID-19. A 49-year-old white woman with hypertension, obesity, diabetes, and asthma would only get 19 points under the rubric, just shy of the 20 point threshold for antibody therapy. But a 50-year-old black woman with no underlying health conditions would receive 22 points, making her eligible.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”