Heading into fall, scientists estimate that COVID-19 has been with us for more than half a year. It’s still unclear, they say, when the virus began to infect people in the United States. But this is certain: the coronavirus has harmed Black and Latinx people at higher rates than other groups, according to emerging data. In communities across the country, Black and Latinx people have been three times as likely to become infected and nearly twice as likely to die from the virus as White people.
In response, the federal government, in June, appointed the historically Black Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) in Atlanta to get at the root of this uneven toll. With a $40 million grant, it asked leaders at the medical school to mount a widespread, comprehensive fight against COVID-19 in communities that have been hardest hit. The work that MSM will do with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Minority Health over the next three years is historic and massive — and getting underway in the middle of the pandemic.
With the grant, the medical college will establish the National COVID-19 Resiliency Network to link vulnerable communities to COVID-19 services and to provide support they need to survive this pandemic or when another public health crisis hits. Dr. Dominic H. Mack, a professor and director of MSM’s National Center for Primary Care, and Daniel E. Dawes, director of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute, will co-lead the new network.
“This work will create the opportunity to measure the effectiveness of interventions being deployed to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. The results of which should lead to a newfound knowledge base to better prepare for and respond to future pandemics, especially in vulnerable communities,” said Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice, president and dean of MSM.
The historically Black Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee competed for the same HHS grant, said Dr. James E.K. Hildreth, Meharry’s president and CEO.
“I’m just happy that it went to an HBCU, not to a majority institution,” Hildreth said. “Sometimes, with programs that have a focus on our populations, we don’t get to do the actual work.”
The country’s four Black medical schools, Hildreth added, already function as a consortium and will be among MSM’s partners on the new COVID-19 grant.
