Black physician alleged racist treatment before dying of virus

Struggling to breathe and pausing between sentences, Susan Moore mustered enough energy to record herself from her hospital bed, where she was being treated for COVID-19. The message she shared: Not even her status as a doctor shielded her from the inferior medical care long endured by other African Americans.

Her white doctor didn’t believe she was short of breath, she said — even though he knew he was treating a fellow licensed physician. Staff at the hospital near Indianapolis attempted to discharge her early, Moore said. And her pleas for medication to quiet pain in her neck were met with sneers, she said.

“I was crushed. He made me feel like a drug addict. And he knew I was a physician. I don’t take narcotics,” Moore recalled in a Dec. 4 video viewed by millions. “I put forward and I maintain if I was white, I wouldn’t have to go through that.”

Moore, 52, died this week, another victim of a virus that is ravaging African Americans and exposing racial disparities and discrimination rampant in the nation’s health care system. Her video, first shared in physicians’ Facebook groups and more broadly after Moore’s death, has become a rallying cry to confront bias in the medical system.

African Americans are routinely undertreated for pain compared with white people who have similar medical conditions. Physicians are more prone to racial bias as they become burned out, a particularly salient finding as the pandemic leaves hospitals overburdened.