EXCLUSIVE: Mayo Clinic Lawyer Helps Medical Professionals Push DEI Despite Supreme Court Ruling

The Mayo Clinic’s legal counsel taught universities and companies in the medical field how to continue advancing the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda despite the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action, audio obtained by The Daily Wire reveals.

Mayo Clinic legal counsel and employment attorney Laura Vannelli gave a talk at the Mayo Clinic’s Rise for Equity conference in early August, grieving the Supreme Court’s ruling against race-based discrimination in college admissions before explaining how those in the medical field could continue to push the DEI agenda.

“My goal today is to provide a simple legal analysis of the information you need to know and help you understand practically what you are still lawfully able to do to advance your DEI efforts,” Vannelli said according to audio obtained by The Daily Wire. “If we can’t get a diverse student body, then we can’t get a diverse medical staff, and we can’t effectively provide the best culturally competent care to our patient population.”

The remarks come as  medical providers and medical schools alike embrace the left-wing DEI agenda under the banner of “health equity.” Proponents claim that health disparities between demographic groups are necessarily a product of discrimination or systemic oppression.

Vannelli also encouraged institutions across the medical field to “be intentional in your recruitment of underrepresented candidates” while warning against policies that could run afoul of the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

“Don’t implement quotas; be thoughtful about it, but still pursue your goals.”

Vannelli warned, however, that the broader DEI agenda could be threatened by the Supreme Court’s decision. “We’re starting to see…groups that are using the rationale provided in the Court’s decision in a Title VI context, to try to take down educational DEI – in the employment context – DEI programming.”

She went on to specifically criticize Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, the organization credited with taking down discriminatory affirmative action practices in academia.

“The last thing I want to do is to give this guy much breath, but I think it’s important because this – and again, I’m speaking on behalf of myself and not on behalf of the Mayo Clinic, because I’m expressing my personal views here,” Vannelli began. “Edward Blum has been around for a while and this success behind taking down affirmative action in higher education really emboldened him.”

“Institutions like this are trying to achieve across the nation and at the federal level to try to prevent groups in all kinds of fields from trying to level the playing field,” she said of Blum’s broader efforts.

Despite her words of caution, Vannelli went on to encourage medical institutions to continue pursuing the DEI agenda. She explained that medical institutions can continue organizing “affinity groups,” race and sexuality-based associations that often act as identity-based activist nodes within wider institutions.

Emory University School of Medicine, for example, has affinity groups for students and faculty called “Black Men in White Coats,” the “Latina/o/x Faculty Affinity Group,” and the “LGBTQ+ Faculty Affinity Group,” among others.

“You can still host retention programming relating to race; so this might be affinity groups within higher education, so long as those groups are open to all,” Vannelli said.

The Mayo Clinic is far from the only institution in the health field that has embraced DEI. Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro previously revealed that the University of California Los Angeles Medical School was indoctrinating its students with “anti-white, anti-American hatred.”

“UCLA med students are told to read about wars of ‘Indigenous resistance’ – in which Native Americans killed thousands of white people – to ‘imagine what liberation could look like,’” Shapiro said, detailing the coursework in a class called “Structural Racism and Health Equity.”

Another investigation from The Daily Wire revealed that the University of Minnesota Twin Cities School of Public Health hosted “anti-racism” trainings that fully embraced the Critical Race Theory agenda. The trainings claim that capitalism was “built on slavery and racism” and that “racism is the status quo” of “all white settler colonialist societies.”