Bridgeport Hospital and the Greater Bridgeport NAACP will host the virtual town hall, “COVID-19 Vaccine: The Facts vs. Fiction, Thursday, Feb. 4, from 5:30 – 7 pm, on Facebook (@bridgeporthosp). Link available at bridgeporthospital.org.
Speakers include:
— Anne Diamond, President, Bridgeport Hospital
— Dr. Lesly Valbrum, Greater Bridgeport NAACP, Economic Dev. Chair
— Gregory Buller, MD, Chairman, Dept. of Medicine, Bridgeport Hospital
— Tesheia Johnson, Deputy Director & COO, the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation
— Rev. Elvin Clayton, Walters Memorial Church & Cultural Ambassador, Yale Clinical Research program
— Elizabeth Rodriguez, Chief Nursing Officer, Optimus Health Care
— John-Ross Clarke, MD, Chief Medical Resident, Bridgeport HospitalSpanish closed-captioning will be available. Questions can be submitted ahead of time to Vaccinecommunity@ynhh.org or live during the event. Please include Bridgeport Hospital Town Hall in e-mail subject line.
“White House Covid Adviser Keeps It Local”
Nunez-Smith is the chair of the White House’s Covid-19 health equity task force, tapped for the role by President Joe Biden.
She’s also an associate professor at the Yale School of Medicine and a practicing internal medicine physician of 20 years.
http://www.newhavenindependent.org › marcella_nunez_smith
Marcella Nunez-Smith is the chair of the White House’s Covid-19 health equity task force said, Covid-19 has disproportionately hurt Black and brown Americans and New Haveners. Just as she outlined during a local NAACP town hall last spring, members of these communities disproportionately work low-wage, essential jobs, have limited access to high quality healthcare, live in dense residential settings, and have a greater burden of co-existing conditions like diabetes and asthma.
“Moving forward, our obligation and commitment has to be to disrupt the predictability of that pattern, in New Haven and beyond,” she said.
She also cited medical surveys where respondents of color overwhelmingly answered that they were confident they would not get the same quality of care as a white patient would if they went to a hospital to be treated for Covid-19. And she noted skepticism in some parts of the Black community towards getting a Covid-19 vaccine.
Part of that wariness comes from the “very, very dark moments in the history of medical experimentation” in this country, including such cases as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment and the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks. Some come from Black people’s experiences of discrimination by doctors and at hospitals that date back just a week or a month.
“We have to be able to name the bias that people have experienced” before more equitable health outcomes can be achieved, she said.