Sylvester Norman, a 67-year-old Coast Guard veteran and retired day-care worker from Nashville, Tennessee, volunteered to participate in the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Million Veteran Program (MVP). He and all 4 of his brothers had experienced kidney illness. During the pandemic, Adriana Hung, MD, MPH, an MVP researcher and associate professor of nephrology at Vanderbilt University, noticed that a disproportionate number of Black patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were dying of acute kidney failure. Dr. Hung used data from Norman and other Black veterans provided through the MVP to identify genetic variations in the APOL1 gene linked to kidney disease found in 1 of every 8 people of African descent. Her research proved that a COVID-19 viral infection can trigger these genes and drive a patient’s kidneys to go into failure. Thanks to her research and volunteers like Norman, a new drug targeting APOL1 may soon receive approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
This is only one example of the life-saving work conducted by the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) during the pandemic. On January 21, 2020, 1 day after the first confirmed COVID-19 case in the US, the VHA quickly activated its Emergency Management Coordination Cell (EMCC) under a unified command structure with round-the-clock operations to track the evolving risk and plan a response to this once-in-a-century pandemic.
