vaccine

COVAX and the challenges of worldwide vaccine access
Vaccines are showing us a way out of the coronavirus pandemic, but vaccine access is still shockingly inequitable. Over a billion doses have been administered since December 2020, but the vast majority have gone to citizens of high-income countries. The COVAX initiative, a unique collaboration led by the Vaccine Alliance Gavi, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the World Health Organization (WHO), aims to combat this injustice.

A scientist’s opinion: Interview with Aurélia Nguyen about the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi)
We spoke to Aurélia Nguyen, Managing Director of the COVAX Facility at Gavi. Gavi was founded in response to a market failure: by the late 90s, many powerful vaccines were becoming available, but they were too expensive for low-income countries, and millions of children were unable to benefit from them. In 1997, the Bill and ...

A scientist’s opinion: Interview with Dr Frederik Kristensen about the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI)
Dr Frederik Kristensen on COVAX: ‘The biggest mass immunisation effort in history’. He has been with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) in Norway since late 2016, initially as Senior Medical Officer, and since January 2018 as Deputy CEO. He started his career as a general practitioner, and before joining CEPI he worked as ...

ESMH Media Review – May 12, 2021
Disinformation, AI & Covid-19: check out the ESMH selection of 29 science & tech news published in the last weeks on the web.

Prof. Wayne Koff : ‘AI can help us design better, safer and faster vaccines’
Wayne Koff, PhD, is the founding president and Chief Executive Officer of the Human Vaccines Project. Human Vaccines Project Prior to joining the Project, from 1999 to 2016, Koff served as Chief Scientific Officer and Senior Vice President of Research and Development at the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) in New York City, leading IAVI’s ...

Quality information given by experts is like a vaccine against falsehoods
Scientists and experts should be available to communicate with the media, or their spot will be taken by false experts. But providing more information to the audience can also have a negative side effect: overconfidence.

Professor Heidi Larson: “This is a key moment to build trust in countries and socio-economic groups with relatively low confidence in vaccines.”
For over a decade, Heidi Larson, Professor of Anthropology, Risk and Decision Science at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, has been leading global efforts to monitor public confidence in immunisation programmes. As COVID-19 vaccination programmes are rolled out across the EU, this is a key moment to build trust in countries and ...

Joana Gonçalves de Sá: “Mitigate the misinformation pandemic by ‘vaccinating’ the susceptible individuals first.”
Joana Gonçalves de Sá is an Invited Associate Professor at the Physics Department of Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, and was the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant to study human behaviour using the online spread of ’fake news’ as a model system. Disinformation and misinformation are not a new problem, so why did ...