Vaccines and Communication: the Global and Japanese Context
- 22 June 2021
- 12:00pm – 1:00pm
- Online
- https://dajf.org.uk/event/vaccines-and-communication-the-global-and-japanese-context
- events@dajf.org.uk
- Tweet
The pandemic has transformed many aspects of our lives and societies. Social distancing rules have prevented us from travelling and Wherever a new vaccine is introduced, there are always people who oppose it. It is more difficult to understand the benefit of not becoming ill, through vaccination, than the risk of becoming ill through an adverse reaction. But vaccine hesitancy appears in different forms for different vaccines, depending on the social context, and can be influenced by communication strategies.
Natasha Loder, Health Policy Editor and host of The Jab podcast at The Economist, will discuss the status and challenges of the British COVID-19 vaccine communication strategy from a science journalist’s perspective. Dr Riko Muranaka will look at the situation in Japan, based on two case studies, of cancer-preventing human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccines and COVID-19 vaccines.
Date: Tuesday 22 June 2021
- UK Time: 12:00pm-1:00pm (BST)
- Japan Time: 8:00pm-9:00pm (GMT+9)
About the contributors
Natasha Loder is Health Policy Editor and host of ‘The Jab’ podcast at The Economist. She has worked there for over 20 years in a range of reporting roles mostly in science, technology, and medicine. Between 2011 and 2015 she was based in Chicago and covered politics, education, and American life. After this, she moved to a health beat. Before arriving at The Economist she worked at Nature, and The Times Higher Education Supplement. She has won awards for her work in feature writing, news, opinion, and investigative reporting. She is a former chair of the Association of British Science Writers, and a current judge of the John Maddox Prize. This recognises the work of individuals who promote sound science and evidence. She is on Twitter as Natasha Loder (@natashaloder).
Dr Riko Muranaka is a medical doctor and journalist, and a former member of the pandemic preparedness and response team at the WHO’s Western Pacific Regional Office and of a clinical trial team for the BioNtech/Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at Bernhard-Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine. She is a lecturer at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Medicine. She won the John Maddox Prize in 2017 for her efforts to bring scientific evidence into the public debate about the safety of HPV vaccines, amid strong opposition from anti-vaccine activists, and a legal attack from the doctor who claimed that this vaccine was dangerous. She is the author of A Hundred Thousand Wombs – Was that Violent Fit Caused by HPV Vaccines? (2018) and Japan seen through the Corona Pandemic – Infectious Disease as a National Security Issue (2020).
