NJIT Undergrad Braeden Perdue Speaks at White House COVID-19 Press Event with Dr. Fauci

In the span of just a few short weeks, NJIT student Braeden Perdue has gone from taking a summer job as a community organizer helping promote COVID-19 vaccine education and access across New Jersey, to becoming a voice for health care equality during the pandemic that has reached the White House and Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Recently, through his work as a COVID-19 Vaccine Outreach & Organizing Fellow with Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan New Jersey (PPMNJ), Perdue got an unexpected invitation to join Dr. Fauci and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff at a press event for the White House COVID Response Team’s “Back to School Vaccination Week of Action” (Aug. 7-14), aired via livestream on WH.gov.

Perdue was nominated to represent Planned Parenthood Federation of America, joining a panel of five other student-organizers from around the country discussing their efforts to aid the national vaccine rollout for a safe return of students and teachers to classrooms ahead of the school year. Perdue spoke specifically about his personal experiences engaging and mobilizing local organizations and citizens in urban centers of New Jersey, advocating the importance of addressing barriers to health care information for marginalized communities as well as getting young people vaccinated.

“What I really wanted to bring to light was the concerns about the vaccine that we are hearing from people on the streets of Newark, Orange or Paterson … it’s often rooted in a conversation surrounding the history of medical racism in this country,” said Perdue ’22, a Science Technology & Society major and member of the NJIT Student Senate. “In a lot of the metro-urban areas we are working in, we are often finding that it isn’t so much a politically motivated thing as much as it is a fear-based hesitancy when it comes to trusting medical experts for a lot of people of color, which I think is a generational trauma.

“The issue is something I notice is lacking in many conversations addressing vaccine hesitancy, so this event was a great opportunity to bring that to the stage on the national level to get the discussion going.”

In early July, Perdue was accepted into PPMNJ’s COVID Outreach Summer Fellowship Program. The 14-week field program is designed to train young organizers, enabling Perdue and other fellows to address health care inequities in local underserved communities by helping develop programs that help deliver medically accurate information about the COVID-19 pandemic, increase access to care and reduce vaccine hesitancy. 

For the past month, Perdue and other PPMNJ fellows alongside him have been tirelessly engaged in outreach efforts including everything from networking with local business and hosting vaccine popup events in major cities, to organizing boots on the ground to connect with residents at their homes and street corners throughout Hudson, Essex and Passaic counties. Perdue says their work is being done as a pilot before the full national rollout in months to come.

“Canvassing is obviously a big part of what we are doing … the biggest impact we see comes from having honest one-on-one conversations with people in cities with the lowest vaccination rates such as Irvington, East Orange and Orange,” said Perdue, who’s organizing work also covers his hometown of Bloomfield. “Our job isn’t necessarily to convince people to get vaccinated, but to give them the resources, tools and proper information to help them work through their hesitancies and misinformation about vaccine side-effects that they may hear about from neighbors or see posted on Facebook.

“So far, the reaction has been a lot more positive and inquisitive when we engage them than I had expected,” he added. “The most rewarding aspect of this is knowing that I’m playing some role in breaking barriers that have plagued these communities for so long. I view it as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to help regain the trust in leadership and science among communities of color, and ultimately save lives not just in the current pandemic but going forward.”