Joe Biden has quickly gotten to work as the president-elect while his predecessor complains without proof that he’s been defrauded of the presidency. The two decidedly different approaches to leading the country were especially on display Monday after Biden made it official that he had selected a Black woman to co-chair his new coronavirus task to effectively confront the deadly Covid-19pandemic that has proliferated on Donald Trump‘s watch.
The move to appoint Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith to be one of three doctors to lead the task force made it clear that Biden was making good on his promise of following the science — not politics — in order to finally make some inroads in stopping a virus that has killed at least 238,000 Americans.
The associate professor of internal medicine, public health and management at Yale University is also the associate dean for health equity research at Yale’s medical school who specializes in health care for marginalized populations. Considering the fact that Black and brown people — also known as marginalized populations — continue to be disproportionately affected by the coronavirus, calling on a Black woman with expertise in that field makes much more sense than, say, appointing a neurosurgeon-turned futile Trump cabinet member who put himself in a position to contract Covid on the task force. (Ben Carson much?)
In particular, Nunez-Smith’s official Yale bio points to her history of having “established the Eastern Caribbean Health Outcomes Research Network (ECHORN), a research collaborative across four Eastern Caribbean islands, supporting several chronic disease research projects and enhancing health outcomes research and leadership capacity in the region,” showing she’s used to her work involving Black folks, in particular.
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