Beth Griffiths

Because Kamala’s decisions are guided by science and medicine

On a cozy evening back home to celebrate my mom’s birthday, my phone rang and displayed a name I didn’t expect: the CEO of my state’s medical society. 

“I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but there’s a cruise ship with people who have COVID coming into Oakland tomorrow, and the governor wants doctors there. Can you be in Oakland by 11 a.m. tomorrow?” 

After rearranging my schedule, texting colleagues to join me, and picking up a white coat from a friend in a movie theater parking lot (after I realized that I of course hadn’t brought mine on a weekend trip back home), I arrived in Downtown Oakland to join a press conference with the governor and public health officials. 

As the COVID pandemic took off like wildfire and raged on, a split screen emerged. In my home state of California, our governor and his team’s first calls were to doctors, scientists, and public health professionals like me and my colleagues, whose advice helped the ship disembark as safely as possible in Oakland. Meanwhile, on the other half of the split screen, at the federal level. President Trump openly admitted that he wanted people to stay on the ship so they wouldn’t increase our COVID count and make him look bad. Throughout the pandemic, he continued to care more about his popularity than real people, and millions of Americans died because of it.

Throughout the pandemic, our state and local leaders continued to follow the guidance of experts—and it paid off. We shut down quickly, leaving me at home in the evenings to brush up on how to manage ventilators in the ICU, but never having to actually do so. While the governor’s office asked me and my physician colleagues back again to take part in a harrowing discussion of triaging who would get ventilators if we didn’t have enough, we never got close to that point. During the day, I drove through the eerily quiet streets of San Francisco to go see patients with COVID symptoms, but we delayed our first real COVID surge until we were no longer storing our masks in paper bags so we could reuse them the next clinic session—something that limits their utility. Like millions of Californians, I first got COVID at a dinner with friends, well after being vaccinated, despite working in COVID clinics. This is what it means to listen to doctors and scientists.

And that’s why I’m supporting Kamala Harris for president of the United States—because her decisions are guided by science and medicine. Whether it’s her role promoting COVID vaccine distribution and outreach, her visit to my university to learn about how we can address the inequities in Black maternal health and then taking action based on what she heard, or her fierce advocacy for giving women the freedom to make their own medical decisions about their bodies with their doctors, Vice President Harris uses what we’ve learned in science and medicine to make American lives better.

Beth Griffiths is a primary care doctor practicing in the Bay Area.