Events of 2020 moved medical students to political activism

Inam Sakinah and her classmates will forever be known as the students who started medical school during the 2020 covid-19 pandemic.
All of them had prepared for this step for years, taking hours of hard science classes in college, studying for the medical school admissions test and often volunteering, working or even getting master’s or other advanced degrees before starting on the long path to earning a medical degree.
But their decisions to become doctors seemed to carry even more weight when set against the backdrop of the events of 2020.
“People were needlessly dying while our leaders were failing,” said Sakinah, a first-year student at Harvard Medical School. “We also saw the crushing inequities the virus laid bare. That was the context in which we were beginning our journey into medicine.” Covid has killed more than 550,000 Americans and disproportionately affected people of color.
And there were other concerns, too. Issues of racial justice came to a head in the wake of George Floyd’s death in May in Minneapolis, while matters of science and public health were subject to debate on the presidential campaign trail.
To many, getting involved in politics quickly became as much a professional responsibility as studying human anatomy or shadowing residents on clinical rounds. Sakinah, for instance, is part of a group of medical students who channeled these concerns into forming a nonpartisan student organization, Future Doctors in Politics. (author introduction) #P4HEwebinarMarch2024