From WHYY: Samantha Greenberg said she was overcome with emotion when she saw an Instagram post about a COVID-19 vaccine clinic for kids under 5 at the Dr. Ala Stanford Center for Health Equity in North Philadelphia. While many Americans returned to their pre-pandemic lives months ago, Greenberg — who has a 14-month-old daughter, Gemma — and other parents of young, unvaccinated children have remained more cautious. Greenberg said her family has largely avoided social gatherings, and Gemma rarely went on a playdate or inside public buildings. “We started going to the playground a couple of weeks ago,” Greenberg said….
From Penn Medicine News: Automated text messaging was as effective as direct phone calls in getting unvaccinated patients to seek out a COVID-19 shot, according to a new study from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania that demonstrated the possibility of lower-cost alternatives to traditional patient outreach. The research was published today in JAMA Network Open. “The take-away is that the text arms of our study were comparable to the phone-only arm, but the text messaging is less resource-intensive since a live call center only needs to talk to those who are already interested instead of making cold…
From Precision Vaccinations: The first human trials of mRNA-based vaccines targeted against HIV began earlier this year. And these phase 1 studies are making encouraging progress with patient recruitment. However, epidemiologists and virologists have recently voiced ‘cautious optimism’ about these vaccine candidates’ success. It is also essential to engage behavioral scientists early in vaccine development. Scientists must think about how to place biological solutions within prevailing social norms, stated an article written by Devi Leena Bose on May 16, 2022. Published by the journal Nature, this insightful article is excerpted below. ‘For an HIV vaccine to be acceptable, experts need to strategize…
From The Atlantic: When the first shots debuted more than a year ago, the message felt mostly uniform. “Everyone was in agreement: These vaccines are fantastic; everyone who’s eligible should get them,” says Gretchen Chapman, a behavioral scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who studies vaccine uptake. And so hundreds of millions of people did. For boosters, experts presented nothing like that unified front. … The erratic narrative on vaccines writ large also hasn’t done the U.S. booster campaign any favors. When the shots were fresh out of the gate, Americans were set up to believe that they could take an…
