New Mexico faces call to end racial prioritization for COVID antibody treatments

The America First Legal Fund has recently notified the state of New Mexico that their "discriminatory practices" of basing COVID treatment priority on a racial basis needs to end.

"We sent a legal warning and letter of potential legal action to the state of New Mexico, who has likewise issued discriminatory COVID-rationing policies. This is something that is a core mission of ours," director Stephen Miller unveiled to Fox News.

In December of last year, the New York State Department of Health took a similar approach to COVID antibody treatments. They prioritized people of "non-White race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity," and used the excuse of so-called systemic racism as one of their reasons for taking that approach.

"This is unthinkable in America," the former Trump adviser remarked on the matter. New York City health officials moved to open more COVID testing sites in "non-diverse" areas after reporting by New York Post’s Jonathan Levine.

The CDC's policy as of February 17, 2022 still has a page devoted to COVID-19 risks by ethnicity.  

"Race and ethnicity are risk markers for other underlying conditions that affect health, including socioeconomic status, access to health care, and exposure to the virus related to occupation, e.g., frontline, essential, and critical infrastructure workers."

The "markers" lingo is in line with what New Mexico’s Department of Health suggests at "risk factor(s) for progression to severe COVID-19."

"The medical establishment in our country has embraced a lot of really wild, far-left theories – the wildest of them being the notion that racial discrimination is a positive good," Miller told Fox News.

New Mexico’s Office of Health Equity plays a key role in outlining and recommending health care policy statewide.

"Health equity is achieved when everyone in our society has the same opportunity to be as healthy as possible, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, economic status, or geographic location," the New Mexico Office of Health Equity states. "New Mexico’s minority-majority population has suffered root shock, historical trauma and the effects of colonization leading to systemic racism and social injustices."

On Thursday, New Mexico’s Democrat Governor announced she’s lifting the state’s indoor mask mandates "immediately."

Midway through June 2021, USA Today labeled it "wrong" that the Biden administration’s COVID debt relief for farmers didn’t apply to whites. A judge halted the program several days after that piece was published.

Fox News points out that up until recently Minnesota had participated in race-based COVID treatment practices as well.

As outlined by Minnesota’s Star Tribune last month, the state removed racial factors in prioritization of monoclonal antibody treatments. The revision in guidance now says that "immunocompromised or pregnant" women are first preferred, instead. Local reporting from the paper names America First Legal’s efforts as the primary cause for the policy change.