The Associated Press Scolds Conservatives for Opposing Racial Discrimination in Covid Care

Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we call foul on the Associated Press’ criticism of conservatives, analyze several recent New York Times fails, and hit more media misses.

The AP’s ‘Republicans Pounce’ Moment

On Sunday, an Associated Press reporter embarrassingly attacked conservatives for opposing discriminatory practices in health-care in a story titled, “New Conservative Target: Race as factor in COVID treatment.”

Some conservatives are “taking aim at policies that allow doctors to consider race as a risk factor when allocating scarce COVID-19 treatments, saying protocols discriminate against white people,” the piece explains.

It goes on to detail all of the ways policies in health-care systems in several states, including Missouri, Minnesota, Utah, and New York, have discriminated against white people, but then argues that “medical experts say the opposition is misleading” because there is “a strong case for considering race as one of many risk factors in treatment decisions” and there is “no evidence that race alone is being used to decide who gets medicine.”

The AP claims the issue — which has been a topic of concern since the early days of the pandemic — only came to the forefront last week when Fox News host Tucker Carlson, former president Donald Trump, and Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) “jumped” on the policies.

The piece claims the protocols have become a “talking point for Republicans” since the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by political commentators John Judis and Ruy Teixeira this month “complaining” that New York’s policy is unfair, unjustified, and possibly illegal.

Yet the racial triage plans “almost certainly constitute illegal race discrimination,” legal scholars told the Washington Free Beacon.

Don’t worry, though: A political scientist at Northwestern University says Republicans are only “twisting the narrative” and that their concern is the base of a “winning political strategy for Trump and Republicans.”

Despite the article claiming that “experts” say the concerns are overblown — with only one so-called expert cited in the piece – it lists several concerning examples of discrimination, including at St. Louis-based SSM Health, which previously required patients to score 20 points on a risk calculator to qualify for Covid-19 antibody treatment. Non-white people automatically received seven points on the risk calculator.

In Utah, a similar risk calculator gives non-white people two points, as did one in Minnesota, where four points was enough to qualify for treatment. Minnesota’s “ethical framework” prioritized black 18-year-olds over white 64-year-olds, despite the latter being at much greater risk of severe disease.

Concerns about discriminatory health practices related to Covid-19 came to a head last year when the Covid-19-vaccine rollout began. A white New Hampshire resident filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services last year after being refused a Covid-19 vaccine by the state because he is not a person of color and thus did not meet its “equity” requirements.

The unnamed 28-year-old man was unable to receive a COVID-19 vaccine in April despite having diabetes and therefore being at “elevated medical risk to COVID-19,” according to the complaint. Meanwhile, the complaint says appointments at a vaccination clinic held by the Public Health Council were reserved for people who identify as “Black, Indigenous or people of color,” regardless of whether those individuals were at an elevated risk for severe COVID-19.

The Dartmouth college newspaper reported that the clinic provided vaccinations to young Asian college students despite denying vaccination to white people at high risk.

However, the AP article ultimately unravels its own argument when it explains that SSM Health said Friday that it had dropped race from its risk calculator last year as health experts’ understanding of Covid-19 evolved.

“While early versions of risk calculators across the nation appropriately included race and gender criteria based on initial outcomes, SSM Health has continued to evaluate and update our protocols weekly to reflect the most up-to-date clinical evidence available,” SSM Health said in a statement. “As a result, race and gender criteria are no longer utilized.”

Yet it is unclear when the scoring system was phased out, given that SSM Health told physicians in a December 30 email that it would use the same rubric it has used early in the pandemic for a monoclonal antibody treatment that has proven effective against the Omicron variant, according to the Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium.

The company appears to have shifted gears following pressure from a conservative legal nonprofit, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which threatened to sue the provider on January 14.

Meanwhile, Minnesota has since removed race from its prioritization scheme and a state official in Utah said its system was being “reevaluated,” according to the Washington Free Beacon.

Headline Fail of the Week

Nina Totenberg, NPR’s legal affairs correspondent, published a piece on the Supreme Court’s internal dynamics last Tuesday with the headline claim: “Gorsuch didn’t mask despite Sotomayor’s COVID worries, leading her to telework.” Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor – and Chief Justice John Roberts, who Totenberg alleged had asked Gorsuch to wear a mask on behalf of Sotomayor – were all surprised by the faulty report. Gorsuch and Sotomayor noted that they were “warm colleagues and friends.” Roberts flatly denied asking Gorsuch or any of his colleagues to don masks.

So, there’s no evidence of anyone asking Gorsuch to wear a mask, no evidence that Sotomayor expressed a concern over his not wearing one, and no evidence that that was the determining factor in her decision to attend oral arguments remotely.

NPR’s public editor, Kelly McBride issued a statement acknowledging poor word choice in the piece, but nevertheless excused it by asserting that “no one has challenged the broader focus of Totenberg’s original story, which asserts that the justices in general are not getting along well. The controversy over the anecdotal lead, which was intended to be illustrative, has overwhelmed the uncontested premise of the story.” Well, uncontested save for by the statement in which Sotomayor and Gorsuch call themselves friends, and state that their only differences are jurisprudential. But then again, McBride already made her disdain for details plain.

Media Misses

-The New York Times published a pair of questionable stories last week, including one outlining how China’s Xi Jingping is “staging the Olympics on his terms.” That piece goes on to say China’s “tenacious — many say ruthless — efficiency was precisely what appealed to Olympic delegates” in the wake of previous Games with “staggering costs” and “white-knuckle chaos.”

Yet despite all of the pressing issues the so-called paper of record could choose to cover, last week it published an article about a group of Massachusetts mothers gathering on a field to scream to relieve built up stress. “The pandemic has been relentless for mothers, many of whom have been stuck in an endless cycle of work and child care,” a subheading on the piece reads. “Some Massachusetts mothers gathered to do something about it.”

-While Democrats have attempted to sell a narrative that their voting rights bills are the key to preserving democracy, White House press secretary Jen Psaki had some flippant advice for those who are frustrated, sad, angry or “pissed off” about the measure failing to pass the Senate last week: “have a margarita.”