How one of the nation’s leading health equity institutions responded to and became
TRANSFORMED BY A GLOBAL PANDEMIC By David Hefner, EdD
I
remember it as if it were yesterday: Our board room had turned into a makeshift war room, but the enemy was unknown … novel. It was early March 2020, and President Valerie Montgomery Rice had called her executive leadership team in an emergency meeting to discuss what we knew, what we did not, and how we were going to respond. The World Health Organization had not yet declared the coronavirus a global pandemic, but we all knew it was coming. One colleague even said, “Eventually, we’re all going to get infected,” a thought that, at the time, seemed hyperbolic. But at Morehouse School of Medicine, with its vast array of extraordinary infectious disease, public health, and medical experts, the knowledge of such historic public health crises was well known, yet none of us had lived through anything quite like this. Morehouse School of Medicine
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