[Glenn Greenwald] New York is Using Race to Determine Access to a Limited Supply of Life-Saving COVID Treatments: The rationale for prioritizing some races over others for access to COVID medications crumbles upon close examination.

But with the Omicron variant now the dominant COVID strain in New York, both the city and state are facing severe shortages in the availability of effective monoclonal treatments. While Pfizer originally claimed its treatment would work against Omicron, the New York State Department of Health issued a memo to all health care providers this week warning that both Pfizer and Merck's treatments are no longer indicated. Instead, “at this time, Sotrovimab (Xevudy) is the only authorized monoclonal antibody product expected to be effective against the omicron variant.” Yet due to “a significant surge in cases and reduced effectiveness of existing therapeutics due to the omicron variant,” the agency warned that “supplies of oral antivirals will be extremely limited initially.” As of today, the agency said, “supplies of Sotrovimab are extremely limited.”

This severe shortage means that there will be far more people who are sick from COVID than there are available doses of monoclonal antibodies treatment. That, in turn, requires that healthcare providers make decisions about who should be prioritized to receive such life-saving treatments and who should be deprioritized, and which factors ought to be used to determine priority.

Before determining priority schemes, it must first be determined which groups of COVID patients are eligible at all to receive these potentially life-saving treatments and which from the start are declared ineligible. The state Department of Health memo sets out the list of all factors which must be met in order for a patient to be eligible. They include age (must be older than 12), COVID status (must have tested positive), and progression of the virus (must have "mild to moderate COVID-19 symptoms").

Then there is an additional requirement that makes intuitive sense: the COVID patient must “have a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness.” It makes sense that the government would seek to prioritize those who are at higher risk for developing severe illness.

But the policy then states that anyone who is non-white — regardless of age, health or underlying medical conditions — is automatically deemed to have met the requirement that one must have “a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness" in order to receive this treatment (“Non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor."). 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.