My sister shies away from the news like a vampire from sunlight.  Still, even she knows what's going on, for she said to me today, "Something is very wrong with the American media.  They're so busy spinning that they don't even pretend to tell the truth."  When she said that to me, she hadn't even seen the AP's ludicrous fact-check of a statement Donald Trump made during his Arizona rally.

Here's what Donald Trump said:

The left is now rationing life-saving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating ... White people to determine who lives and who dies. If you're White you don't get the vaccine or if you're White you don't get therapeutics. ... In New York state, if you're White, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical health.

There is a simple fact-check that deserves to be made against Trump here because he did misstate the truth about vaccines when he said, "If you're white, you don't get the vaccine."  In fact, vaccines are available to everybody.

The racism attached to vaccines actually flows against minorities in the form of vaccine mandates.  It's minorities who are least likely to get vaccines, which means that the vaccine mandates barring people from their jobs or preventing them from access to daily life in their communities hit minorities hardest.  That's racism.

I wouldn't expect the AP to make that very pertinent point about the incredible racism against minorities inherent in the vaccine mandates.  However, the two journalists it took to write this little fact-check could simply have stated that Trump was wrong and that vaccines are readily available.  Instead, they editorialized about Trump being a racist ("The former president seeded racial resentment...") and then went the extra mile.

Image: Internet meme showing the lengths to which the media will go to defend vaccines from the truth.

That extra mile concerns Trump's statement that "If you're White you don't get therapeutics. ... In New York state, if you're White, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical health."

The reality is that Trump's statement is correct.  Here's what happened in New York State:

NY State Department of Health warns they don't have enough Paxlovid or Monoclonal Antibody Treatment and white people need not apply. https://t.co/shbMWDomLJ pic.twitter.com/MwBtjv2pDx

— Karol Markowicz (@karol) December 31, 2021

White people go to the back of the line.  Other jurisdictions decided to do the same, most notably Utah and Minnesota (which walked it back after the outcry).  In each case, race was assigned points, sometimes more points than actual comorbidities, in determining who qualifies for therapeutics.

In other words, Trump was "absotively, posilutely" correct.  But the AP couldn't give him that.  Instead, this is the laughable pretzel that emanated from AP's alleged "fact-checkers," which is irrelevant spin that fails to address core facts:

[T]here is no evidence they [sic] being sent to the "back of the line" for COVID-19 care as a matter of public health policy.

[snip]

Trump distorted a New York policy that allows for race to be one consideration when dispensing oral antiviral treatments, which are in limited supply. The policy attempts to steer those treatments to people at the most risk of severe disease from the coronavirus.

It says that nonwhite race or Hispanic ethnicity "should be considered a risk factor" because long-standing health and social inequities make people of color more likely to get severely ill or die from the virus.

One can understand if health care providers were told to focus on people's symptoms, rather than their race (although it's hard to imagine New York health care workers doing that).  However, the policies explicitly say race must be counted alongside health.

In other words, people who are not White get a weighted preference in the allocation of health care.  Race matters more than comorbidities.  This means that Trump was right and that this part of the "fact-check" is wrong.  But hey, it worked to smear Trump, so the narrative is intact, and that's all that really counts.