In this episode of COVID19 Road to a vaccine, our host, Associate Professor Nigel Crawford, speaks to Professor Heidi Larson. Heidi is an anthropologist and Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project and Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The Vaccine Confidence Project is a WHO centre of excellence on addressing vaccine hesitancy. Heidi is the previous head of Global Immunisation Communication at UNICEF, chaired GAVI’s advocacy taskforce and served on the WHO SAGE working group on vaccine hesitancy. In this episode they discuss:

•How and why Heidi founded The Vaccine Confidence Project
•Why vaccine confidence is already proving to be so important in relation to a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine when there is not yet a vaccine that has gone through all the phases of a clinical trial
•Whether or not vaccine confidence is impacted by the way in which different countries are handling the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic
•The importance of health care workers modelling vaccine uptake to promote vaccine confidence
•Positive ways we can use social media to promote vaccine preparedness
•Resistance to mandatory vaccination and the importance of community vs herd immunity
Links:

The Vaccine Confidence Project:
https://www.vaccineconfidence.org

WHO: Denmark campaign rebuilds confidence in HPV vaccination
https://www.euro.who.int/en/countries/denmark/news/news/2018/3/denmark-campaign-rebuilds-confidence-in-hpv-vaccination

Japan’s HPV crisis: act now to avert cervical cancer cases and deaths
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(20)30047-5/fulltext