While the blatant horrors of the past are gone, the ideas that fueled race-based medicine stubbornly linger. We can change.

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For years, physicians and medical students, many of them Black, have warned that the most widely used kidney test — the results of which are based on race — is racist and dangerously inaccurate. Their appeals are gaining new traction, with a wave of petitions and papers calling renewed attention to the issue.

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Racism kills. Whether through force, deprivation, or discrimination, it is a fundamental cause of disease and the strange but familiar root of racial health inequities. Yet, despite racism’s alarming impact on health and the wealth of scholarship that outlines its ill effects, preeminent scholars and the journals that publish them routinely fail to interrogate racism as a critical driver of racial health inequities.

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In New York City’s poor neighborhoods, some patients have languished in understaffed hospitals, with substandard equipment. It was a different story in Manhattan’s private medical centers.

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Three doctors say the pandemic revealed enduring racial inequity — and medicine alone cannot fix it.

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The unjust killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, amplified by the health disparities of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ethnic disparities of the political climate, have shined a spotlight on historical and ongoing institutional racism in America. Many professional scientific organizations have published statements opposing it. But statements have little impact unless actions result from them.

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A decade ago, the Department of Health and Human Services made “to achieve health equity, eliminate disparities, and improve the health of all groups” one of its goals for Healthy People 2020. It didn’t come close.

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At the consumer genetics giant 23andMe, CEO Anne Wojcicki last week issued a remarkable statement calling her product “euro-centric” and saying her company is “part of the problem.”

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Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Hastings Center president Mildred Solomon and two Hastings Center fellows address concerns that crisis triage protocols aimed at allocating scarce health care resources to save the most lives could be biased against people with disabilities.

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The inequitable racial landscape of the United States is hardly deniable. The effects of racism on health status and on access to health care are well documented. Comprehensive race/ethnicity data relevant to Covid-19 will likely affirm inequitable patterns in exposure, testing, and treatment, patterns that are already being observed by practitioners in some facilities and officials in some states.

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