In January 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the White House set a goal to get 100 million people immunized with the newly approved vaccine within 100 days.
The Biden administration established a COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force to assure that the vaccine distribution was done equitably across all populations. The person charged with overseeing that effort was Yale's Marcella Nunez-Smith, one of the nation's foremost experts on health and health care disparities.
She immediately set about taking steps to bring vaccines to a wide array of communities, Jeffrey Zients, who was chief of staff for then-President Joseph Biden, recalled recently. That work, he said, included setting up relationships with community health centers, barber shops, and churches to house neighborhood clinics.
Within 100 days, about 220 million individuals had been vaccinated. And as importantly, "the response was indeed equitable, with Black, Hispanic, Asian, vaccination rates the same as the white population," Zients said in a video recording he had prepared for a recent event honoring Nunez-Smith as winner of Yale's annual Elga R. Wasserman Courage, Clarity, and Leadership Award. "This was the first time that we'd had an equitable response to a public health crisis. And that was very much attributable to Marcella's leadership. We used to call it the 'Marcella effect.'"
Zients was among several current and former colleagues who lauded Nunez-Smith's efforts in public health and health equity during the Yale Women Faculty Forum's annual reception on Oct. 14. Others attending the ceremony in the President's Room at Yale Schwarzman Center included Yale President Maurie McInnis and Provost Scott Strobel.
The Wasserman award is presented annually to a faculty or staff member who has demonstrated "tremendous courage, clarity, and leadership" in community service and who has "excelled in articulating and advancing the highest aspirations" of the Yale community. Wasserman championed women's inclusion at Yale as a special assistant to the president under Kingman Brewster from 1969 to 1973, and helped oversee the university's transition to coeducation.
Nunez-Smith is the C.N.H. Long Professor of Internal Medicine at Yale School of Medicine (YSM), professor of epidemiology and of public health at the Yale School of Public Health, and associate dean for Health Equity Research at YSM. Her research focuses on promoting health and health care equity for marginalized populations.
