Research!America board members, Advocacy Award honorees, and staff in the news

Georges C. Benjamin, MD, executive director of the American Public Health Association, was quoted in a Huffington Post article on “What to do if you live with someone who may have coronavirus.” Dr. Benjamin has been interviewed by a host of media outlets including the Washington Post, The Hill, Newsweek, The New York Times, and ESPN.

Ellie Dehoney, Research!America’s vice president, policy and advocacy, was quoted in Bloomberg Law on the topic of the COVID-19 stimulus package. “Our nation must fully empower federally funded research, coupled with private sector innovation, to defeat this virus,” she said. “Going forward, it will be critical to invest in sustaining and fostering the recovery of our nation’s research institutions so that U.S. scientific capability is strengthened, not dissipated, by COVID-19’s disruptive impact.”

Mikael Dolsten, MD, PhD Chief Scientific Officer and President of Worldwide Research, Development and Medical at Pfizer, was quoted in STAT News discussing a new potential drug to treat coronavirus. “Given that this is the most threatening pandemic in a century, affecting human health in an unprecedented manner and disrupting society and business, we have mobilized our capabilities across multiple fronts,” he said. The endgame, Dolsten said, would be “a vaccine that can protect our population and expel the virus from the soil of America and back to the empire of bats.”

Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, a dean at Baylor College of Medicine and co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, spoke with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC about clinical trials for coronavirus vaccines. Dr. Hotez has been a frequent guest on CNN and other networks. Dr. Hotez received the 2018 Research!America Advocacy Award for Sustained National Leadership.

Anupam Jena, MD, PhD, associate professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and physician in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital was recently featured on NPR for his TED Talk entitled: What Are Some Less Obvious Ways COVID-19 Could Change Our Lives? Dr. Jena was Research!America’s Eugene Garfield Economic Impact on Medical and Health Research Awardee in 2007.

Mark McClellan, MD, MBA, MPH, director of the Robert J Margolis Center for Health Policy and the Margolis Professor of Business, Medicine and Health Policy at Duke University, spoke in an interview with Fox News “The Story” with Martha MacCallum, “Former FDA commissioner expects antibody testing will reveal most people still don't have coronavirus immunity.” “Even though we've seen a lot of cases, most people, perhaps the vast majority of people still don’t have immunity. That’s something we’re going to have to plan ahead for." Dr. McClellan has appeared on multiple news outlets during the pandemic including PBS Newshour, CNN, and CBS Detroit.

Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, DPhil, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and Research!America 2019 Isadore Rosenfeld Award for Impact on Public Opinion awardee teamed with Ken Burns to bring his book “The Gene: An Intimate History” to a documentary format for PBS. The team previously joined forces on an adaptation of “The Emperor of All Maladies.”

Sudip Parikh, PhD penned a compelling opinion piece in STAT entitled CDC: remember who you are. The article reminds readers: “The CDC not only set the standard for what a national public health agency does, but it trained others to carry out that mission around the world.”

David R. Williams, PhD, MPH, who received the Research!America 2019 Herbert Pardes Family Award for National Leadership in Advocacy for Research, was quoted in The Hospitalist, “COVID-19 cases highlight longstanding racial disparities in health care.” “Many Americans are shocked” by the higher mortality rates among African American COVID-19 patients, said Dr. Williams. However, data from decades of research show that “black people in America live sicker and shorter lives,” he said. Dr. Williams is the Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health, Chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Professor of African and African American Studies and Sociology at Harvard University.

Roy Wilson, MD, president of Wayne State University wrote an opinion piece in the Detroit Free Press entitled, Race disparities amid infectious diseases aren't new. It's time we took action. Per Dr. Wilson: “I urge that we focus now on what can be done to narrow this racial disparity in outcomes for COVID-19, starting with a more effective communication effort targeted toward African-American communities.”

Mary Woolley, president and CEO of Research!America, was published in the New York Times with a letter to the editor entitled, Let’s Commit to Invest in Science. Mary’s letter was in response to Eric Schmidt’s opinion piece: I Used to Run Google. Silicon Valley Could Lose to China.

Elias Zerhouni, MD was interviewed for a story in Science magazine, “To streamline coronavirus vaccine and drug efforts, NIH and firms join forces.” “We need the best research standards,” he said. “To me, the whole effort is to create a synergy between all of the players.”