News | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Black people more than three times as likely as white people to be killed during a police encounter

Black Americans are 3.23 times more likely than whites to be killed by police.

Perspective: Racism is ‘pernicious, pervasive, cutting short lives’

The legacy of slavery in the U.S. has led to a wide range of health inequalities that have plagued the African American community for years, wrote Michelle Williams, dean of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in…

A black ER doctor reflects on everyday encounters with racism

Khama Ennis, MPH ’02, is chief of emergency medicine at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Massachusetts. As a black doctor, she sees racism every day. Ennis wrote about the bias she encounters from patients in a June 11, 2020…

Ending racial injustice in health

George Floyd’s death has magnified both the urgent need to end racism and, in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, the urgent need to end the racial injustice of health inequity in America, wrote Howard Koh of Harvard…

Could protests cause COVID-19 spikes? Tough to tell.

If coronavirus infections surge in the wake of protests against police brutality and racism, it won’t necessarily mean that the protests are what’s causing the increase. That’s because the protests have been happening around the same time that…

Racism can erode physical well-being

The chronic stress of experiencing discrimination can gradually erode people’s physical well-being over time, according to Mary Bassett, director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. Bassett was one of several experts…