They Hate You and They Want You to Die

 NYPo, NYC admits prioritizing race in distributing COVID tests: leaked emails

New York City health officials have been using race to help decide how to allocate precious coronavirus testing resources, leaked emails from the agency show.

In a conversation with reps for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, City Councilman Joe Borelli’s office said constituents on Staten Island’s South Shore were having trouble getting tested at city facilities.

“Our office has been receiving calls regarding the mobile NYC H+H testing sites such as Wolfes Pond Park. It appears many are waiting with delays, and are being turned away after waiting for hours,” wrote Borelli staffer Briana Nasti in a Dec. 22 email.

The agency responded the same day and informed Nasti that they would prioritize neighborhoods flagged by the city’s Taskforce on Racial Inclusion & Equity.

The task force, created by the de Blasio administration in 2020, identified 31 underserved neighborhoods to receive “priority” attention from the city.

The task force said nabes were picked based a DOHMH’s analysis of “health status, living conditions, social inequities, occupation, and COVID-19 Wave 1 impact” — though the methodology has never been released.

Staten Island’s mostly white, middle-class South Shore — despite one of the highest COVID rates in the city during December — is not one of the priority neighborhoods. The borough has 13 city testing sites, all on the more diverse North Shore.

“I think we are clearly not on their racial and ethnic rubric priority list,” Borelli told The Post. “There was no problem pointing fingers at the South Shore of Staten Island when it came to sending enforcement goons.”

You know, if you want to end racism, and stuff, you might be better off if you didn't practice racism. 

It's a good thing that the Omicron variant is proving pretty mild. 

More at the Volokh Report, N.Y. Rationing COVID Drugs Based on Race

Sick non-Hispanic whites can only get oral antivirals if they have a medical condition or unspecified "other factors that increase their risk for severe illness"; sick "[n]on-white[s]" and "Hispanic[s]" don't face such a requirement.

That's from the N.Y. State Department of Health, Dec. 27, 2021. . . .

As Glenn Greenwald points out:

That means that a healthy twenty-year-old Asian football player or a 17-year-old African-American marathon runner from a wealthy family will be automatically deemed at heightened risk to develop serious COVID illness—making them instantly eligible for monoclonal treatments upon testing positive and showing symptoms—while a White person of exactly the same age and health condition from an impoverished background would not be automatically eligible.

This policy was first flagged by New York journalist Karol Markowicz, whose Twitter summary described it as "white people need not apply." That summary is not accurate. White people who are sick from COVID can still be eligible for antibody treatment, but only if they first demonstrate that they have "a medical condition that increase[s] their risk for severe illness." But non-white people have the significant advantage of being automatically eligible without having to demonstrate that, since their non-white race is deemed to inherently constitute an increased risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19. In other words, when determining eligibility for life-saving treatments, New York state is explicitly prioritizing some races over others.