Nashville—Dr. James Hildreth, president of Meharry Medical School, continues to be a leading voice in the Covid-19 crisis — this time in a national setting.
Hildreth has been appointed to a Food and Drug Administration committee that will evaluate coronavirus vaccine candidates.
The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee is a “group of academic scientists, doctors and federal health officials will scrutinize safety and efficacy data on every coronavirus vaccine candidate, and make a pivotal recommendation to the FDA on whether to greenlight or shelve each shot,” Politico said in an article.
“There are not many African-American scientists who have gone into the field that I’ve chosen. The point is to make sure that the interest of the people that we care about are best served. I sort of feel obligated to do this because, oftentimes, I’m the only African American that will be sitting at a table. I think it’s just important that I do this,” Hildreth told the Nashville Post.
According to its website, the committee’s next meeting will be on Oct. 22.
Meharry Medical School recently received a $34 million donation from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a $1.5 million donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and a donation of test kits and supplies from Thermo Fisher Scientific.
Founded in 1876, Meharry is the nation’s largest private, historically Black academic health sciences school, with an enrollment of 877 students in 2019, according to Nashville Business Journal research.