Two men suing New York state and city for racial discrimination, not allowing COVID treatment because they’re white.
QUICK FACTS:
- Two fully vaccinated men are suing the city and state of New York for unconstitutional racial discrimination for directing medical providers to consider race in distributing lifesaving treatments against COVID-19, The Epoch Times reports.
- Plaintiffs Jonathan Roberts (61) and Charles Vavruska (55) are ineligible for treatments because they are non-Hispanic whites, say their lawyers at Sacramento, California-based Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a national public interest law firm.
- The legal complaint in Roberts v. Bassett (court file 1:22-cv-710) was filed Feb 8 in federal court in Brooklyn, the defendants being Mary Bassett in her official capacity as Commissioner for the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH), along with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene of the city of New York.
- New York’s health department had laid out eligibility criteria for oral antivirals, listing risk factors, among them being “non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity.”
- The department justified this racial criterion by saying “longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19,” Epoch Times notes.
- But New York’s designation of race as an independent risk factor “has no basis in science,” the complaint states, as it goes on to say that evidence that race by itself “makes an individual more susceptible to suffering adverse effects from COVID-19” doesn’t exist, because race is “an arbitrary classification that lumps in many different individuals with different attributes and different needs.”
- The Mayo Clinic found in August 2020 that “there’s no evidence that people of color have genetic or other biological factors that make them more likely to be affected by COVID-19.”
WHAT PACIFIC LEGAL FOUNDATION ATTORNEYS SAY:
- PLF senior attorney Anastasia Boden said New York’s policy is “part of a growing trend to continuously view the world in terms of race, to not see people as individuals, but solely as members of the groups they’re born into, and to dole out benefits and burdens on the basis of immutable characteristics, and that’s exactly what the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to prohibit,” Epoch Times reports.
- That amendment “was meant to allow people to be seen as individuals and to make race an arbitrary and unimportant characteristic,” Boden told The Epoch Times. “New York is elevating race above everything else.”
- Both the state and city “allocate very important but scarce COVID treatments not only on the basis of things like chronic disease, cancer, and diabetes, but also on the basis of race,” Boden said.
- “We have no control over the race into which we are born, and to make that a determinative factor” is both “deeply unfair” and “unconstitutional.”
- “The Constitution prohibits the government from drawing lines in the sand on the basis of immutable characteristics,” she added.
BACKGROUND:
- The lawsuit comes after former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson ridiculed the city’s directive as an example of critical race theory in action, Epoch Times notes.
- “I certainly don’t think that the virus discriminates,” Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, told “The Chris Salcedo Show” last month. “I think it takes everybody. And this is absolute absurdity. We’ve gone crazy. This is, you know, critical race theory infiltrating everything.”
