Document Type
Editorial
Publication Date
7-2021
ISSN
1526-5161
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Language
en-US
Abstract
Lowering the standard of care in a pandemic is a recipefor inferior care and discrimination. Wealthy whitepatients will continue to get “standard of care” medi-cine, while the poor and racial minorities (especiallyblack and brown people) will get what is openlydescribed as substandard care rationalized by the asser-tion that substandard care is all that we can deliver tothem in a crisis. (IOM 2009) Paul Farmer’s experiencein responding to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa is ashocking, if extreme, example of how dangerous topatients this practice is. White patients were treatedwith the US standard of care, including transfer to theUS for treatment, black (local) patients were often givenlittle no medical care at all (on the premise that it wastoo dangerous for caregivers to touch them or to placeIVs to hydrate them). The standard of care for the localpopulation, in Farmer’s words, “in many cases didn’tresemble care at all.” (Farmer 2020) As COVID-19 hastaught us, structural racism in healthcare is not just aproblem in West Africa, and does not just manifestitself in a pandemic.
Recommended Citation
George J. Annas & Sondra S. Crosby,
Standard Racism: Trying to Use “Crisis Standards of Care” in the COVID-19 Pandemic
,
21
The American Journal of Bioethics
1
(2021).
Available at:
https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2021.1941424
