The Hall Center for Law & Health will be hosting the last Virtual Ground Rounds of 2021 on on Thursday, November 4 at 1:00 pm.
Brietta Clark will be the featured speaker. She will be speaking on “Trust, Racial (In)Equity & Health: COVID-19 & Beyond.”
In this presentation, Brie Clark will explore the role of trust in shaping health, and she invites us to think critically about how the existing trust deficit impacting certain groups is a product of existing health law and policy. This trust deficit has received heightened attention during the COVID-19 pandemic—most prominently raised in connection with government and health officials’ early concerns about vaccine uptake by Black individuals, and most commonly characterized as the product of a history of medical experimentation and abuse against Black people. But this narrow focus and understanding of the trust deficit that shapes the Black community’s experiences with the health system obscures the full scope and impact of the problem, which, in turn, risks enabling government responses that exacerbate, rather than reduce, health inequity. This presentation surveys pervasive and contemporary sources of mistrust that undermine individualized health care, broader health promotion efforts, and professed racial equity goals, to illustrate why the trust deficit deserves greater interrogation as a structural determinant of health in COVID-19 and beyond. It also suggests that the concept of trust provides a valuable lens through which to evaluate the ongoing pandemic responses and other health law and policy reforms, in terms of how likely they are to advance or undermine emerging commitments to health equity.
