Professor Watchlist

Dr. Michelle Morse is an internal medicine and public health doctor who, according to her LinkedIn biography, “works to achieve health equity through global solidarity, social medicine and anti-racism education, and activism.” Her faculty biography describes her position as “an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School/Brigham and Women’s Hospital and co-founder of the EqualHealth and Social Medicine Consortium.”

Morse has several, notable publications, including “Reparations for Black American descendants of persons enslaved in the U.S. and their potential impact on SARS-CoV-2 transmission,” and “How to Act Upon Racism- not Race- as a Risk Factor.” The former publication, regarding reparations, made the claim that the United States should pursue racial-justice interventions, including reparations payments, to ameliorate racial disparities that originated through COVID-19.

According to a report by Campus Reform, Morse was featured as a keynote speaker for a medical residency graduation ceremony. One Brooklyn Health, a New York-based network of hospitals, held its ceremony on June 7, 2023, that included Dr. Michelle Morse as the keynote speaker for the second consecutive year.

Morse began her speech by mentioning contributors to what she called “scary times,” including:

“Misinformation about what is contained in COVID vaccines, misinformation about the ways public school teachers instruct students about our country’s violent founding and enslavement, settler colonialism, patriarchy, structural racism, or what really happened on January 6.”

She recalled her experiences during the AIDS epidemic and how it motivated her to become an “even more radicalized student activist,” and that she returned to the United States to “do more direct activism for social justice during residency.” Within the speech, she also asserted that “the current state of our country is unfair and unjust towards people of color, period.”

After the speech, a graduate attendee shared some thoughts with a Campus Reform reporter, saying that many students are discontent with the rise of woke ideology in the medical field, but are afraid to speak up because they feel as though they are “slaves to debt,” and cannot afford to risk losing their jobs by speaking out.

Updated – July 28, 2023

 

Michelle Evelyn Morse, M.D. is a Instructor of Medicine and an Affiliate in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University.  She is also co-founder of the Campaign Against Racism, which describes itself as an organization that seeks to “dismantle structural racism and its effects on health around the world.”

In an interview with The World, Morse outlined what she believes is structural oppression in the healthcare field. She explained how the Coronavirus is exposing divides caused by racism:

“And I think what we’re seeing with the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on communities of color is that these are the fault lines that have existed for generations. And the sources are the very social arrangement that puts white people on top and black and brown people on the bottom.” 

 Morse has admitted that the long-term goal of her organization is to destroy capitalism, saying, “…the systems of racial capitalism and structural racism that we’re trying to impact and upend and break down are going to take much, much longer” 

Morse is also very candid about utilizing the coronavirus pandemic to accomplish her organization’s ambitions of fundamentally transforming the country: 

“We have to seize on this moment. We have to make sure that health workers are not just assumed to be the heroes of COVID-19, that we actually do the work of upending the sources of oppression that have led to these inequities and that we recognize that that takes time and that that takes constant pressure.”