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This is Our Body Politic. I'm the creator and host, Farai Chidea. We're looking at the challenges the Biden-Harris administration faces from the very start. First and foremost, how to distribute COVID vaccines. Dr. Grace Lee is a medical officer at Stanford Children's Health and a member of the U.S. Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. That's a federal advisory group that makes recommendations about vaccinating the U.S. population.

She also belongs to several COVID-19 vaccine subgroups and committees at the national, state, and local levels.

Welcome to Our Body Politics, Dr. Lee.

Thanks for having me.

With everything that you're doing, all these different subgroups, all these different committees, all of this important work, what would you say is your number one priority or focus in terms of how the vaccine

reaches the public? For me personally, it's really about ensuring that we can safely

deliver the vaccines and give the public confidence about receiving vaccines and getting vaccinated.

I mean, you know, we've been so fortunate that the development has gone as well as it has,

and we have two incredibly efficacious vaccines, and we have seen unprecedented demand.

But one of the things that I think is important to remember for all of us is that vaccine acceptability is not even

across the board. And we have seen that there has been just such a disproportionate impact

of COVID-19 infection and disease. I've taken it really personally, actually. The impact on

health equity that or really the disparities that already existed

and that have been exacerbated or compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and feeling strongly

that vaccines are, you know, one, small, but really measurable and a potentially effective way for us to address health disparities

and really to move us towards closer to the goal of achieving health equity.

What we're beginning to see, though, is that in some cases, the populations that are most

...