Welcome to Season 2 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement,

and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department.

Our goal is to bring scientific evidence and experience to the public health news of the day

through informative interviews with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health

officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at

Public Health Question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast

episodes. Today, I speak to Dr. Lisa Cooper, a Bloomberg distinguished professor and the director

of the Johns Hopkins Center

for Health Equity. Our topic is the participation of racial and ethnic minorities in the

clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines. Why it is so important, why it is so difficult, and what can be

done. Let's listen. Dr. Cooper, it is so great to have you back on the podcast again,

and I want to talk today about the clinical trials for the COVID vaccines.

And one of the key questions that has come up is the diversity of the trials,

particularly the racial and ethnic diversity of the participants.

Why is this an important consideration for the vaccine trials?

So first of all, thanks for having me back, Josh.

And I'm glad you asked to talk about this particular issue because, you know, this is something that has come up for a long time is that in a lot of the research

we do, the studies have included white men, but have not included, you know, people from

diverse backgrounds. And even for a long time, a lot of women weren't included in clinical trials.

And so the NIH has come up with a number of requirements, really, that we include people

from different groups in society in our research, because when we develop treatments, we need to

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