Former President Donald Trump claimed on Saturday during a rally in Florence, Arizona, that white people are being discriminated against in the allotment of COVID-19 treatments.
“The left is now rationing life-saving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating white people to determine who lives and who dies,” Trump said.
“You get it based on race. In fact, in New York state, if you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical help. If you’re white, you go right to the back of the line.”
The former president cited a Wall Street Journal article titled “New York’s Race-Based Preferential Covid Treatments.”
According to the article, COVID-19 treatments such as monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals are in short supply, and New York State has published guidelines outlining how to allocate them to those in biggest need.
Because of “longstanding systemic health and social inequities” that increase the risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19, the guidelines state that “non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor.”
Similar guidelines have been issued by the health departments of Utah and Minnesota.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Hispanic or Latino people die from COVID-19 at a rate 2.1 times that of white people, and Black or African American people die at a rate 1.9 times that of white people.
“If you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine, or if you’re white, you don’t get therapeutics. It’s unbelievable to think this. And nobody wants this, Black people don’t want it, white people don’t want it, nobody wants it,” Trump said at his rally in Arizona.
It’s unclear what the former president meant when he said white people don’t get vaccinated
According to Bloomberg, Black and Hispanic vaccination rates lag behind White rates by 10 percentage points or more in nearly half of US states
Several Black people can be seen in the crowd behind Trump wearing “Blacks for Trump” t-shirts and cheering in a clip of Trump’s speech aired by the right-wing Right Side Broadcasting Network.
People wearing ‘Blacks for Trump‘ t-shirts are often positioned prominently behind Trump at his rallies.
