New Mexico latest state to face legal action over race-based COVID treatments

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FIRST ON FOX: New Mexico is facing possible legal action from an organization that aims to overturn the state's controversial health care rationing policies, which allegedly uses skin color as a basis to decide whether to provide treatment.

America First Legal, a conservative group, has issued a warning to the state of New Mexico to cease all discriminatory practices regarding COVID-19 health care. The legal group has threatened with a lawsuit if the state does not comply.

"We sent a legal warning and letter of potential legal action to the state of New Mexico, who has likewise issued discriminatory COVID-rationing policies. This is something that is a core mission of ours," said Stephen Miller, former adviser to President Trump and director at America First Legal Fund.

President Biden during a conference call on Sept. 17, 2021. (Al Drago/Getty Images)

TUCKER CARLSON: IT'S TERRIFYING THAT AMERICANS ARE BEING DENIED COVID TREATMENT BASED ON RACE

New Mexico's policy is not a new one — the same race-based care rationing has been implemented and overturned in Minnesota, New York and elsewhere.

"[New York] issued a decree rationing COVID medicine on the basis of race, where two people otherwise medically identical, but one was Caucasian and one was not, the Caucasian would not be able to access the medical treatment," Miller said. "This is unthinkable in America."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a recommendation for race-based rationing earlier this month, writing, "Race and ethnicity are risk markers for other underlying conditions that affect health, including socioeconomic status, access to health care, and exposure to the virus related to occupation, e.g., frontline, essential, and critical infrastructure workers."

In addition, the Food and Drug Administration issued guidance stating "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 may make individuals more eligible for monoclonal antibody treatments.

In this Oct. 30, 2020 file photo, President Donald Trump's White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller follows President Donald Trump on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

"The medical establishment in our country has embraced a lot of really wild, far-left theories – the wildest of them being the notion that racial discrimination is a positive good," Miller told Fox News Digital.

The New Mexico Office of Health Equity is the state's official department dedicated to outlining and recommending health care policy.

"Health equity is achieved when everyone in our society has the same opportunity to be as healthy as possible, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, economic status, or geographic location," the New Mexico Office of Health Equity states. "New Mexico’s minority-majority population has suffered root shock, historical trauma and the effects of colonization leading to systemic racism and social injustices."

Miller attributed this racial categorization for health care to what he said is a larger, interconnected problem in state bureaucracies. He asserted that the policies and ideologies behind racial health care rationing are amplified and reinforced in academia.

"The left, over time, has made a concerted effort to occupy career slots in bureaucracies," Miller told Fox News Digital. "You have this mutually reinforcing system whereby the schools that churn out the degrees that people take with them into the bureaucracy are likewise supporters of, and enthusiastic enactors of these policies."

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Minnesota recently removed race as a preferential factor regarding which COVID-19 patients will receive monoclonal antibody treatment, after receiving backlash.

Following controversy, the state's rationing guidance was updated to offer priority for such infusions to people who are immunocompromised or pregnant, but did away with a scoring system that took race into account, according to the Star Tribune.

The new move came the same day that health departments in Utah and Minnesota faced potential lawsuits after issuing guidance using race and ethnicity as factors in prioritizing distribution of coronavirus treatments, as first reported by Fox News Digital.