ABOVE: Howard Bauchner speaking at the University of Texas at Austin in 2015
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Update (June 3, 2021): Today, JAMA's interim editor-in-chief, Phil Fontanarosa, and colleagues published an editorial in the journal outlining “a range of editorial priorities and approaches to strive for and promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Howard Bauchner, the editor-in-chief of JAMA for the last 11 years, will resign at the end of June following backlash over comments made by another journal editor about racism in healthcare. JAMA’s executive editor Phil Fontanarosa will serve as interim editor-in-chief.
Bauchner’s departure comes months after two editors of JAMA journals suggested in a podcast that structural racism does not exist in medicine. The two white doctors—Ed Livingston, the deputy editor of clinical content at JAMA, and Mitchell Katz, an editor at JAMA Internal Medicine—denied that they themselves were racist, suggested the word racism “might be hurting ...
