Kizzmekia Corbett is a brilliant 34-year-old African-American woman who is leading the National Institute of Health’s effort to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus.

Her brilliance was first recognized by her third-grade teacher, Mrytis Bradsher, at the Oak Lane Elementary School in rural Hurdle MIlls, North Carolina. In her 25 years of teaching, she had not seen such a precocious child. Ms. Bradsher pushed her mother to make sure young Kizzy went into classes for gifted children.

Corbett, 34, is a long way from the tobacco and soybean farms that surround her old elementary school. The advanced reading and math classes at Oak Lane prepared her to become a high school math whiz. She was recommended for Project SEED, a program for gifted minorities that allowed her to study chemistry in labs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a 10th-grader. She accepted a scholarship for minority science students that paid her way through the University of Maryland Baltimore County and introduced her to NIH.

Some people have complained about her tweets, especially when she pointed out the lack of diversity on the Trump coronavirus task force. She should ignore them.