Pandemic solutions: COVID-19 sheds light on systemic biases Black physicians face

Is the United States prepared for the next pandemic? Bird flu cases are on the rise, newly elected President Donald Trump recently removed the United States from the World Health Organization, and Robert F. Kennedy, who has a history of propagating vaccine misinformation, and attempted to suppress COVID-19 vaccine authorizations during the pandemic, is now running the Department of Health and Human Services.

- JORDYN PYKON

If another pandemic should come our way and experts say it will it will be imperative to learn from the systemic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the undue hardships endured by Black doctors.

While COVID-19-driven physician burnout increased tremendously during the pandemic, the stressors contributing to this burnout were not experienced equally among all physician populations. Minority as well as marginalized physicians were disproportionately impacted early in the pandemic compared to other physicians, with Black doctors being especially affected, according to an American Medical Association (AMA) report from 2020. The outcomes of this reinforce the legacy of health inequities and structural racism experienced by Black Americans.

Diana Lemos, one of the authors of the AMA report, told the AmNews that she and her team decided to conduct this study after seeing many reports and articles in the media emphasizing the specific ways physicians of color were impacted by the pandemic. Through a web-based survey, she and her team analyzed the impacts the pandemic had on non-minoritized, non marginalized physicians.

The report showed that Black physicians were among those who expressed the "highest rates of burnout onset or increase due to COVID-19." Other findings from the AMA report found that Black physicians were more likely to experience "racist treatment from colleagues or patients" and that they were among those more likely to have a lack of resources to provide COVID-19 testing and treatment.

The lack of Black doctors