No to distributing kidneys based on race
Washington Examiner
Video Embed
Should the distribution of donated kidneys be decided based on patients’ race?
Medical ethics would seem obviously to forbid such a thing. Yet this is what’s happening. You can thank the Left’s diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda, which has poisoned not only the nation’s learning institutions and corporations but also its hospitals.
UNCLE JOE HAS A CAR YOU CAN’T REFUSE
As the medical nonprofit group Do No Harm reported this month, the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network and the United Network for Organ Sharing will abandon medicine-based decisions on kidney transplants. This, they say, is because kidneys are not going to enough black patients when objective medical criteria are applied. The scales are therefore to be tilted to achieve “equity.”
The new formula will favor black patients in a way that ignores human biology and makes no medical sense. The new regime requires doctors to ignore a medically documented and racially significant difference in a specific chemical marker of kidney function. From now on, these organizations will treat the readings as if there is no difference by race. This will push nonblack patients further back in line despite desperate need. Many black patients will move forward for replacement kidneys even if their eligibility or need for a transplant is less than that of some white patients.
In the name of equity, OPTN will also stop giving preference to people who in the past donated a kidney. Usually, donors are given priority in compensation for their generosity. Now they will be moved back in the race-based system. Five times as many kidney donors are white as are black, which means white people will be hit harder than black people.
DEI nonsense is bad enough on college campuses, but it is much worse in engineering and medicine. It must not be allowed to happen. The choice of who gets the next kidney should always be based on medical and ethical considerations about people — the patient’s need, his or her long-term prospects, and perhaps the number of people who depend on the patient’s survival for their own. But it is not a doctor’s job to weigh the value of one life against another using large demographic measurements.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Doctors should not be picking people from the “right” racial or ethnic groups. Medicine is not about making statistical quotas come out right but about treating patients irrespective of race, ethnicity, or beliefs.
DEI is not medicine. Nor is the desecration of medical practice a proper form of reparation for past injustices. Just as race-based suspension and school discipline policies have made school violence more common and lowered the quality of education for everyone, this toxic effort to racialize medicine will defeat that profession’s purpose. It must not be allowed to stand.