The death of DEI: Med schools racial preferences degrade all doctors

Have you been to a doctor recently? Or seen a nurse? Lucky you if your doctor or nurse graduated long ago!Americans’ trust in the medical profession has tanked — from 73% confidence in medical leaders in 1966 to a feeble one-third in 2022, with only one in five people feeling confident about the health-care system. Anthony Fauci certainly contributed, equating himself to science while contorting it, covering up and mismanaging during the COVID pandemic, but set him aside.Two recent stories show why Americans increasingly distrust the profession.The smaller repugnant story: A Virginia nurse (now fired) urged medical providers to sicken ICE agents with laxatives, paralytics or poison ivy.

Whatever happened to “First, do no harm,” medicine’s most basic commandment? Must patients worry about health-care providers considering themselves activists first, dehumanizing people to identity labels?The larger, far more consequential story also involves identity and activism.The Department of Justice moved to intervene in a lawsuit launched by Do No Harm (the organization combating identity politics in medicine), Students for Fair Admissions (of the landmark racial-discrimination case against Harvard) and a rejected white applicant to UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.

The plaintiffs accuse UCLA of ongoing race-based admissions, in brazen defiance of the Supreme Court’s 2023 SFFA v.Harvard ruling that such discrimination is unconstitutional.President Trump’s Justice Department opposing race-based admissions is a much-needed change from Biden’s, which axed the prior Trump administration lawsuit fighting Yale University’s discrimination against Asian applicants.Americans know labeling and judging people by their color is immoral, dehumanizing and plain illegal.

Each alone should be sufficient reason for UCLA to stop the harm.Another reason is compelling by itself: Racial preferences corrupt merit and undermine trust.The DoJ fi...