The Women on Biden's COVID Task Force Are Ready to Make Big Changes, Fast

BAW Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith

Coming off of Wednesday's historic inauguration, where Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took their rightful place as President and Vice President of the United States, many Americans are breathing a sigh of relief as we move toward a new, and hopefully less chaotic, chapter in our country's history. But after the confetti settles, we must still acknowledge the challenges that lie ahead, chief among them the COVID-19 pandemic which is far from over. The Biden administration has already made it clear that navigating the country out of this pandemic and bringing relief to those suffering is priority number one. 

And he's taking on that tremendous challenge with a 13-person COVID task force including two women featured in InStyle's Badass 50 list published earlier this month. Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, the founding director of Yale's Equity Research and Innovation Center, and Dr. Céline Gounder, an epidemiologist (or "disease detective"), journalist, and documentary filmmaker, serve as prominent members on the force. Both have been active in spreading reliable information about this crisis and advising President Biden's team before he took office, and now, in the words of Joe, they are ready to go to work. 

"We want to restore trust in science, public health and government. This begins with transparency and two-way communication," Dr. Gounder told InStyle. Dr. Nunez-Smith, who co-chair's the task force, echoed the sentiment, assuring that, "the incoming administration will be listening to scientists and experts when thinking about our nation's public health." These ideas serve as a stark contrast to the previous administration, which treated science as some kind of threat and consistently misled the American people when it came to the coronavirus.

In President Biden's action plan to combat the coronavirus, he commits to "a decisive public health response" that "eliminates all cost barriers" to testing, preventive care and treatment, and the vaccine — the rollout of which under Trump was disorganized to say the least. His plan also promises a "decisive economic response" to supply families with emergency paid leave and financial support to small businesses that are struggling as a result of the pandemic. "Make no mistake: this will require an immediate set of ambitious and progressive economic measures, and further decisive action to address the larger macro-economic shock from this outbreak," the website for Biden's plan says. 

Leaders of the task force intend to focus on the inequality in our country that the pandemic has exacerbated. "Before we communicate out, we need to hear from communities about their concerns and be sure we have a plan to address them. Health equity will be a throughline in all of our work to combat the coronavirus pandemic," says Dr. Gounder. 

For her part, Dr. Nunez-Smith is heading up the Health Equity team of the Biden task force. "The journey to health, particularly for marginalized communities in our country, is one that deserves a wider lens," she says. As someone who grew up in an underserved area, Dr. Nunez-Smith understands firsthand the correlation between poor health in marginalized communities, and a lack of healthcare services in those communities. "Health is determined 20% by what we do in the clinical setting and over 60% by societal realities," she says, a reality that leaves vulnerable communities which lack proper access to healthcare even more at risk. 

So, how can we move forward and tackle this pandemic for all Americans? Dr. Nunez-Smith remains hopeful. "I'm finally letting myself imagine a new dawn, where we come together in some shared understandings of what systemic racism has done to our country, to our neighbors, to our friends, and to people that we don't know but should care about because of our shared humanity," she says. She implores that, "We want to get to this new normal, but I'm hoping when we do, we are actually on a path to true equity." In the end, Dr. Nunez-Smith will be fighting for everyone in her new role. "What I aspire to is to use my voice for the folks who aren't in the room. That's my responsibility and obligation — to make the invisible visible."

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