The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare what structural racism looks like in healthcare settings, workplace practices, and living conditions that disproportionately expose Black and brown communities to unfair health outcomes. Racial scholars have urged policymakers to rightfully shift their units of analysis from personal decision-making to the structural inequities that racially and ethnically minoritized communities face.

The syndemic interaction between the COVID pandemic with the ongoing HIV pandemic makes visible the role that disparate access to healthcare and the other social determinants of health has on one’s exposure. As such, Gilead Sciences Incorporated funded a national training effort called “Two in One” to equally promote HIV/PrEP screening alongside COVID-19 vaccine screenings in the same primary care setting. The Two in One Model includes primary research, evidence-informed PCP training, and policy recommendations on the screening guidelines.

Our goal for publishing with HPHR Journal is to share a collection of scholarly papers that debunk theories that maintain people as problems as opposed to the conditions they live in as this aligns with the journal’s mission to investigate biological, psychosocial, and environmental determinants of health. While this supplement focuses specifically on HIV and COVID-19 prevention, its theoretical frameworks, methods, research, and policy implications have transferability to a range of other disparate patient outcomes. These papers illustrate how prioritizing the values and realities of the most marginalized groups is a community-centered approach useful for eliminating discrimination and stigma.