Yale Sees Racism Where It Doesn’t Exist

A tipster at the Yale School of Medicine just let us know about a telling development at the prestigious institution. The short version: Yale is ditching a clinically proven kidney diagnostic tool on the grounds that it’s racist, but it’s not. The woke crowd sees racism at every level of healthcare even when the evidence says they’re wrong.

Here’s the long version. Yale is abandoning a test that physicians have used for decades to diagnose and manage chronic kidney disease, which afflicts millions of Americans. The test was designed according to the highest ethical and evidence-based standards. Crucially, the test automatically changes its findings for African American patients by 15%. That reflects real-world clinical experience, which has decisively proven that African Americans have a consistently higher level of the chemical compound the test measures.

How does science constitute racism? It doesn’t, but woke activists have claimed it anyway. They argue that simply accounting for racial differences is itself racist. Unsurprisingly, a small group of vocal activists have spent years demanding this kidney test be changed.

Yale has now given in. When announcing this decision, Yale’s Chief Clinical Officer, Thomas J. Balcezak, declared that “race-based assessments have been used for decades in American healthcare to influence medical decisions, and more recently, they have been found to reduce the quality of care received by patients of color.” 

But there’s no evidence this long-standing kidney test has hurt anyone. To the contrary: The test enables physicians to provide better care to minority patients, because it accurately accounts for medical reality. While Yale is replacing this test, the new one will add costs to care without changing that care one iota.

Sadly, the facts don’t matter to the activist crowd. They will find racism regardless of whether it’s there, because that’s the whole point of woke ideology. But surely we can find new and better ways to diagnose and treat patients without falsely claiming that proven methods are racist.