Victor Anthony Lopez-Carmen, a Dakota and Yaqui writer, health policy advocate, and member of Boston's COVID-19 Health Inequities Taskforce spoke to Boston Public Radio on Tuesday about how the coronavirus pandemic has disproportionately affected Native Americans.

When Harvard Medical School switched to remote learning last March, Silvia Huerta Lopez went back to her family in New Jersey. She had quarantined for two weeks before leaving Boston, to avoid potentially bringing the novel coronavirus home. But her entire family was already sick and coughing — months later they all tested positive for coronavirus antibodies.

Booster is a series exploring the COVID-19 vaccine, and what it means for young people — from the science behind it to how it impacts our lives. In this op-ed, LaShyra "Lash" Nolan explores how centuries of medical racism contributes to some in the Black community mistrusting the COVID vaccine.

"For Annie Cathcart, a graduating Harvard Medical School MD/PhD student, applying for her residency in OB/GYN this year could have been very challenging. She gave birth last September and traveling for interviews would have been difficult, especially having to decide whether to bring her infant son with her or leave him at home.

But because of the COVID-19 pandemic, she didn’t have to."

It’s December in my Southern California town, and the mornings are always cold. If I can convince my father to turn on the barely functional heater before bedtime, he will turn it off by four in the morning to save money. I do not blame him. Neither he nor my mother has a stable job — and not only because of the widespread job losses caused by the coronavirus pandemic. In spite of being two of the hardest-working people I know, they have lived at the economic edge — and sometimes slipped over it — my entire life.

According to the American Medical Association, of the roughly 5.2 million American Indians and Alaska Natives in the United States, approximately 3,400 are physicians. Put another way, Native Americans, at 2 percent of the US population, make up just two-fifths of 1 percent of physicians working in America today. And there aren’t enough of us... Read more about Where are all the Native American medical students?

“Community service is always going to be central to what I do,” says second-year MD student Jalen Benson. “These incredible institutions like Harvard have a lot of low-income—and especially Black and brown—people in their shadows who don’t feel they can access state-of-the-art hospitals. A large part of the reason is historic and institutional barriers that are present today, so my goal is to minimize those barriers.”

A young Black man arrives in the emergency room, doubled over in pain from a sickle cell crisis. “It’s an act,” says the attending physician dismissively. “I think he just wants drugs.” The attending refuses to prescribe the opioids he might give to a white patient in similar straits. Andrea Reid, MD ’88, associate dean for student and multicultural affairs for the  Program in Medical Education and director of the Office of Recruitment and Multicultural Affairs at Harvard Medical School, witnessed too many such scenes as a trainee in Boston-area hospitals in the 1980s and ’90s.