The Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) under Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, now his party’s presumptive vice presidential nominee, used race to determine who could receive potentially life-saving medication during the COVID-19 pandemic, documents show.
In 2021, Minnesota adopted a framework, which they later reformed following pushback, that assigned points based on various personal attributes to ration monoclonal antibodies, a COVID-19 treatment that was in short supply at the time, according to state documents. Under the state’s point system, a healthy 25-year-old black person, for instance, would have been put in front of a 55-year-old white person with hypertension or a 64-year-old white person to receive monoclonal antibodies during the pandemic due to their race.