In the Spring of 2020, rural Alabama was struggling to get access to COVID tests. That’s when Dr. Pamela Payne-Foster stepped in.
“We have to go there,” Payne-Foster told her boss, Dr. John Higginbotham, who is the chair of the Department of Community Medicine and Population Health and the founding director of the Institute for Rural Health Research at the University of Alabama. He has worked with Payne-Foster for over a decade.
“Pam told us, ‘You set up the testing center, I will get them there,’” he said. And the people came out in droves.
“Pam was out there directing traffic, taking people’s temperatures,” Higginbotham recalled. “She was doing whatever was needed.”
Payne-Foster, who is asthmatic, knew what she was doing was risky. But that didn’t stop her.
“I knew the people coming would be Black and Latinx, and a lot of our staff is white,” she said. “I said, ‘Look, I gotta be a face out there.’”
Payne-Foster is a public health physician and professor of community medicine and population health at UA’s College of Community Health. She’s also an expert on HIV/AIDs in rural areas, and calls herself an “activist researcher, trying to research in ways that affect policies and attitudes.”
