Usha Lee McFarling, National Science Correspondent at STAT, has been named the recipient of the 2024 Bernard Lo, MD Award in Bioethics. This year’s award recognizes Ms. McFarling for her role in shaping the public discussion and policy debate about bioethics and equity in healthcare and research. It conveys a cash prize of $25,000.
With the announcement, Ms. McFarling becomes the first Lo Award recipient to be selected from outside academia. A longtime, Pulitzer-prize winning science and health reporter, Ms. McFarling brought her focus to inequities in health and medicine as they emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic. Her continued reporting on these disparities has become essential to public understanding on a number of issues, including racial differences in pulse oximeter functioning, disproportionate early departures of Black residents from medical training programs, and the lack of diversity in orthopedics.
Ms. McFarling’s work revealing and amplifying unequal treatment and practices within health and medicine has substantially changed the way that these subjects are discussed and addressed.
She is regularly cited in books, academic articles, and other outlets’ reporting on similar topics. According to STAT, “her stories on health equity are among the most widely read on our website.”
The conversation generated by this reporting has led to real-world impact. Ms. McFarling’s work on pulse oximeters has been cited by a slate of Attorneys General urging the FDA to move more quickly on the issue. A 2021 resolution by the American Psychological Association acknowledging its role in racism and racial discrimination featured, as an example of this history, Ms. McFarling’s work exposing “health equity tourism.”
“Ms. McFarling’s journalism is unparalleled in shining light on inequities in health, medicine, and science. These are some of our field’s most pressing challenges, and her reportage and storytelling have been essential to the progress made to combat them,” said Greenwall Foundation President & CEO Michelle Groman, JD.
Of receiving the award, Ms. McFarling said, “I am truly humbled to receive the Bernard Lo, MD Award in Bioethics. I’m very proud that my coverage of the many inequities that run throughout healthcare and biomedical research has had such a large impact in moving the public conversation and policy action forward. This award highlights the importance of these issues, and how much work is still needed to effect meaningful change.”
The Greenwall Foundation established the Lo Award to honor Dr. Lo’s service to The Greenwall Foundation as its President & CEO from 2012 to 2020 and founding Director of the Foundation’s flagship Faculty Scholars Program. The Lo Award is given annually and recognizes a different area of accomplishment in bioethics each year.
Hear more from Ms. McFarling about her approach to reporting stories that move forward the public conversation and policy debate in the latest installment of our Bioethics & video series: