Ohio U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance spoke with The Ohio Star Monday about anti-white discrimination in monoclonal antibody treatment for patients with COVID-19.
“You should not, in this country, have your fortune determined by your skin color,” he told The Star, noting the irony of having the discussion on Martin Luther King Jr. day. “It’s a fundamental principle of our Republic that we should not punish or reward people based on skin color, but we’re doing that right now.”
Vance says the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is leading the charge of prioritizing monoclonal antibody treatment for minorities, forcing white Americans to the back of the line. Though the way states prioritize patients is up to the individual state, there is evidence to suggest that the distribution policies are driven by the federal government agency.
The FDA’s fact sheet for Sotrovimab, a monoclonal antibody treatment, lists conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and chronic lung disease as factors for prioritization.
But it adds a caveat.
“Other medical conditions or factors (for example, race or ethnicity) may also place individual patients at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, and authorization of sotrovimab under the [Emergency Use Authorization] is not limited to the medical conditions or factors listed above,” the fact sheet says.
“There’s a lot of evidence that this is coming from the FDA. So Minnesota, Utah and New York are picking up on the FDA’s racialized criteria,” Vance said. “It’s up to the states at the end of the day, but this is coming from the federal government, which of course is controlled by the Biden administration.”
The FDA told The Star it was observing Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and declined to comment.
Vance said the policy is an extension of Critical Race Theory (CRT), and noted that just like the left denies that CRT exists or is being taught in primary schools, the left will also deny that COVID-19 treatments are being unequally distributed.
“The idea that in order to close racial gaps you should discriminate in healthcare is straight out of the Critical Race Theory playbook. The idea [CRT] is not real is a joke. We’re seeing it in the distribution of these therapeutics right now.”
Vance says that racialized prioritization of the treatment is happening in at least three states, and thinks Republicans need to be more vocal about it.
“This is really, really vile stuff. I mean first of all I think this reveals the fundamental cowardice of the Republican Party,” he said. “The fact that our leaders aren’t willing to call this stuff out, it’s like ‘what purpose do you have in public life if not to point out racialized distribution of COVID therapeutics. The Democrats, I think like it, so they’re not going to call it out. They like what’s happening.”
“Look, this is extraordinarily dark. I know that it’s happening in at least three states – Minnesota, Utah and New York. [Healthcare providers] get points on [the federal government’s distribution] if you have a certain skin color,” he continued. “I would like to live in a real country where we ensure that there are therapeutics for everyone, instead of allocating them based on skin color. I think it’s illegal. It’s certainly immoral, and it’s shameful, unfortunately, that neither Democrats nor Republicans are calling it out.”
Vance thinks that America is headed down a slippery slope of anti-white discrimination in medical care.
“The slippery slope that I worry about is if we’re delivering antibodies based on skin color, why not hospital beds, why not cancer therapies, why not antibiotics? This is a fundamental line that I don’t think we should allow ourselves to cross,” he said.
There has also been controversy around the federal government’s distribution of monoclonal antibodies to states as a whole. Florida, which has championed the treatment, is perhaps the most prominent example.
There, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo in late December accused the Biden Administration of “actively preventing the effective distribution of monoclonal antibody treatments in the U.S.” after the Administration stopped shipping antibodies to Florida.
Vance says the politicization of the treatment is about government power.
“I think that there’s political incentives for people to focus on vaccination over alternative therapeutics because that’s become the Democrats’ big issue. I think vaccine mandates justify a pretty substantial increase in government power, because if you can require someone to get a vaccine to go to work that’s something the government can be involved in,” he said.
“We haven’t seen nearly the federal effort to ensure antibodies are available to everyone, which of course we could do,” he said. “This is not rocket science. These antibodies have been approved for over a year at this point.”
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Pete D’Abrosca is a contributor at The Ohio Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “JD Vance” by JD Vance.
