Aug 12, 2023
This episode's guest is Professor Heidi J. Larson, the Director of The Vaccine Confidence Project. She is a professor of Anthropology, Risk and Decision Science at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, Seattle; and at the University of Antwerp and KU Leuven, Belgium. Her research focuses on managing risk and building trust in vaccines, vaccine trials and building cooperation in the context of disease outbreaks and pandemics.
Prof. Larson previously headed Global Immunization Communication
at UNICEF, chaired
Gavi’s Advocacy Task Force, and served on the WHO SAGE Working
Group on vaccine
hesitancy. She is the author of STUCK: How Vaccine Rumors Start –
and Why They Don’t Go Away (Oxford University Press, 2020). In
2021 she was named by BBC as one of the 100 most
influential women in the world and was awarded the 2021 Edinburgh
Medal for her work.