Tucker: Why are Americans putting up with this?
‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ host discusses the left’s politicization of healthcare.
In the weeks before Joe Biden took office a little over a year ago, federal officials met to decide how they were going to distribute the new COVID vaccines. If you'll think back, you'll remember that December of 2020 was the deadliest month to date in the COVID pandemic. More than 65,000 Americans had died that month. People are very afraid of the virus. Then there was no treatment protocol for it. Vaccines seemed like the only hope. So the meeting was very significant.
The CDC’s chief medical officer, a person called Kathleen Dooling, unveiled her plan to distribute the vaccines nationally. She began by acknowledging that older Americans indeed face the greatest risk, as everyone understood. So logically, if you wanted to save as many Americans as possible from dying, you would give preference the very first shots to people over 65. That's the obvious policy. It might be the only morally defensible policy.
But there was a problem with doing that, she explained. Older Americans were too White, as Dooling put it, "Racial and ethnic minority groups are underrepresented among adults age 65 and older." And this meant, according to Dooling, they could not be allowed to get the first COVID shots, whether they needed them or not.
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So instead, Dooling recommended giving priority to a group the government started calling essential workers. Their main qualification was not that they were essential, but they were less White than old people.
So that's what the CDC went with. Its panel overwhelmingly approved Kathleen Dooling's recommendation. None of this got a lot of notice at the time, but it was a major change. Never in American history, modern history in any case, has the federal government made it official policy to withhold lifesaving medical treatment from Americans on the basis of their skin color. But that's exactly what the CDC did.
Those most likely to die of COVID had to wait weeks until their vaccines were approved. How many of them died in the meantime as they waited? No one kept track of those numbers because nobody seemed to care. And because nobody cared, the trend continued. Race had become a deciding factor in the distribution of critical health care in this country. Several states made it explicit. Whites would go last in the COVID vaccine queue regardless of need. The state of Vermont did this, so did the state of Montana. And then the moment he was declared President-elect Joe Biden made it official. A concept called equity, a kind of hyper-aggressive, racially hostile affirmative action would form the basis of everything the new administration did, beginning with COVID policy.
Here's Biden before even being sworn in last year:
JOE BIDEN: I want to be very clear what my priorities are for distributing this emergency aid swiftly and equitably. Our focus will be on small businesses on Main Street that aren't wealthy and well-connected, that are facing real economic hardships through no fault of their own. Our priority will be Black, Latino, Asian and Native American-owned small businesses, women-owned businesses.
So you'll notice the assumption in that sentence which undergirds all the assumptions behind the administration's equity policy, and that is that non-White means poor and non-White means less healthy.
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As a factual matter, that's certainly not true across the board. It's not even close to true. In fact, the highest income groups in this country are not White, but they've run with it. And he made good on that promise. In its first year, the Biden administration awarded billions of dollars in COVID relief, for example, to Black farmers purely on the basis of their skin color. Race was the only criterion. Now doing that was illegal, obviously. It violated all kinds of federal laws, and a federal court soon struck it down. But the White House didn't stop the accelerated, and they applied that same standard to everything, very much including the allocation of health care.
Health care for all? That was the slogan for generations. The new slogan under the Biden administration was health care for favored groups. And those policies continue tonight. They're illegal, they're immoral. And yet they are all but ignored by the media and, by the way, by Republican lawmakers.
Several weeks ago, for example, the Food and Drug Administration released a fact sheet on a monoclonal antibody called sotrovimab. Sotrovimab is, at this point, the only monoclonal antibody treatment that has proven effective against the latest variant of the coronavirus. The FDA provided guidance for physicians in all 50 states, telling them how to determine which patients should get this critical treatment. Physicians, the FDA explained, should consider quote race and ethnicity as they administer treatments, and so physicians are doing that across the country.
In Utah, COVID patients are triaged by a scoring system that determines whether they qualify for these potentially life-saving antibody treatments. If you look at the scoring system, you’ll notice that race often counts more than physical health. The state of Utah, for example, gives two points to anyone simply for not being White. You win if you're not White. If you have congestive heart failure at the same time, you get one point. So if you're a White, congestive heart failure patient, that's not enough for you.
It's the same story in Minnesota. Minnesota awards to point to so-called BIPOC patients. That means anyone who's not White. If you have high blood pressure and you're 60 years old, you get one point. So tough luck for you. Imagine if that was one of your parents. It is one of someone's parents.
In New York, writes Aaron Sibarium in a shocking new piece for the Washington Free Beacon, "Racial minorities are automatically eligible for scarce COVID-19 therapeutics, regardless of age or underlying conditions." It doesn't matter what kind of health they're in. All that matters is their skin color. Whites don't qualify.
This is not health care, it's punishment, it's punishment meted out on the basis of skin color. Now the justification for all of us, and the authorities could not be clearer about it, they've taken their ideas directly from America's colleges, they'll tell you why they're doing this, the justification is history. The United States has mistreated racial minorities in centuries past, they say. Therefore, Whites must suffer now. So your ancestors did bad things or people who looked like your ancestors did bad things. So now we're withholding medicine from you. They call this equity. It's not equity. It is collective punishment. It's the North Korean standard. It's the definition of evil.
And in case you're wondering, that's actually what it is, consider this: A young Haitian man could cross our border illegally today. Many have. That person could show up at a clinic in New York tomorrow for COVID treatment and get preference over an elderly American citizen purely because of his appearance. Think about that. The Haitian has not suffered from systemic racism in America, whatever that is. He just got here. But he goes to the front of the line anyway.
Now, that's not a criticism of the Haitian. It's not his fault. He didn't make the rules. But the Americans who did make the rules clearly didn't make them on the basis of public health. They made them in an effort to hurt a specific group of Americans. And they're succeeding. This is happening everywhere, even in places you would never expect it to happen.
This man talked to an employee at a Texas medical facility to find out exactly what their policies are.
HARRISON HILL SMITH: So I’m not going to be able to get it today?
NURSE: Nuh uh.
SMITH: Because I don’t qualify? What if I like smoked and vaped? ‘
NURSE: No.
SMITH: But if I were Black or Hispanic, then I would be able to qualify? I’m being denied medical service because of my race?
NURSE: That’s the criteria.
So you can't get lifesaving drugs from the government of Texas if you're the wrong color. Think about that.
We reached out to the Texas Department of Health about this back in November, and they denied allocating any health care on the basis of race, but of course they were lying. The North Central Texas COVID 19 Regional Infusion Center was created by the Texas Department of Health last year. The Infusion Center's website, which says it's state-funded, featured an information sheet that explicitly listed race as an eligibility factor for getting antibody therapy. That's what you just saw there - someone being denied medical treatment because he's the wrong color, without even assessing the relative health risks involved. The website, maintained by county of Tarrant County in Texas, explains that being non-White automatically makes you eligible for treatment.
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So this is still happening on a wide scale. The question is: Why are Americans putting up with this? It's immoral. We're used to hearing that your kids kick into a certain school if they're the wrong color or get a certain job if they don't have the right appearance, and apparently have accepted that. The only sin is complaining about it, that makes you a monster.
But denying health care to American citizens because of their race? That is too much. Actually, it's terrifying.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the January 10, 2022, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
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