Meet The African American Doctor At the ‘Forefront’ Of Moderna’s Coronavirus vaccine

With the Food and Drug Administration preparing to approve the first coronavirus vaccine for use in America, millions of lives and a return to normalcy hang in the balance, and the rollout will reveal an African American doctor at the center of vaccine development, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett.

“The very vaccine that’s one of the two that has absolutely exquisite levels – 94 to 95% efficacy against clinical disease and almost 100% efficacy against serious disease that are shown to be clearly safe – that vaccine was actually developed in my institute’s vaccine research center by a team of scientists led by Dr. Barney Graham and his close colleague, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, or Kizzy Corbett,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, told CNN.

Corbett is a 34-year-old North Carolina native who is a research fellow and scientific lead for the Coronavirus Vaccines and Immunopathogenesis Team at the National Institutes of Health. In April she appeared on CNN to discuss the need for a vaccine and a possible timeline.

On her personal Twitter account, Corbett has tweeted about the vaccine as it was developed.

Fauci hopes that Corbett’s role on the vaccine team will create more support in the African American community for immunization.

“The first thing you might wanna say to my African American brothers and sisters is that the vaccine you’re going to be taking was developed by an African American woman – and that’s just a fact,” Fauci said. “I think that’s one of the things that people don’t fully appreciate.”

Generations of systemic racism in the health care system and the Tuskegee Experiment have led many African Americans to view medicine with more skepticism than other populations.