Treating Covid-19 is still a work in progress. (So is preventing infections, but we won’t go into that here.)
Disease experts, drug developers, and doctors are still learning what treatments and drugs are helpful to save severely ill Covid-19 patients.
When Trump was hospitalized, and apparently sicker than his doctors and aides let on, he was treated with remdesivir, an injectable anti-viral drug developed to treat hepatitis C, tested against Ebola, and is now being widely used for Covid-19; while not a miracle cure, it appears to shorten hospitalizations, reduce need for ventilators, and save some lives. (Details here.)
Other experimental treatments for Covid-19 include regeron, another drug administered to Trump while he was hospitalized, which is a monoclonal antibody, and certain steroids. (However, most monoclonal antibodies, with a couple of possible exceptions, appeared to be ineffective against the Omicron variant in clinical trials, see details here.)
When you’re in a crisis, you go with what you’ve got, which includes improvising and experimenting. And if something appears to help, ideally you try to get it to everyone who needs it, or at least as many as you can. In the real world, though, you can’t expect perfection.
Mother Jones notes that Covid-19 has disproportionally taken a toll of people of color: “Black, Latino, and Native Americans have been more likely than white Americans to be infected, hospitalized, and ultimately die of Covid-19.” Now, studies show they’re also less likely to get the sought-after, best-available treatments, “especially … the monoclonals.”
What analyses of treatment data revealed was that, “On average, Black and Asian patients were treated with monoclonals 22 percent and 48 percent less often, respectively, than white patients. Other races, including Native Americans and Pacific Islanders, were treated 47 percent less often than white patients. Hispanic patients were treated with monoclonals 58 percent less often than those who were non-Hispanic.” In “nearly every month” of the study period, which covered March 2020 to August 2021, “white patients were more likely than [other races] to be given the potentially life-saving treatment.” (Read story here.)
This disparity is too large and persistent to be random or accidental, although some of it may be attributable to data collection imperfections mentioned in the Mother Jones article. And where racial disparity in distribution of sought-after treatments in limited supply exist, that doesn’t necessarily mean providers are making racist decisions about who gets them. More likely, the article suggests, it results in part from differences in “access to transportation, testing, and care; inadequate insurance coverage; supply issues; … and a lack of messaging in communities of color about the availability of the treatment,” although “potential biases in prescribing practices” also could be a factor.
But these barriers to treatment, even though inadvertent, are a result of a socioeconomic system that leaves millions of minority Americans disadvantaged, because they’re less likely to have insurance, less able to afford top-drawer medical care, and often have fewer health care resources in their communities (e.g., Native American reservations). You can’t address these problems without discussing their causes, and it’s hard to explore causes without exploring whether systemic racism plays a role, yet Republicans are on a crusade to outlaw any mention of racism in our country because it might make white people “feel bad.”
Given this evidence that America’s minorities are getting more than their fair share of Covid-19 infections, and less than their fair share of the available Covid-19 treatments, I think we need to have a discussion about this that just might include “critical race theory” as one of the topics to be explored in a search for solutions leading to fairer treatment of our minorities.