Heidi Larson

Heidi J. Larson is an anthropologist and the founding director of the Vaccine Confidence Project.[1][2] Larson headed Global Immunisation Communication at UNICEF[3] and she is the author of Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start and Why They Don't Go Away.[4]

Heidi Larson
Born (1957-04-21) 21 April 1957
CitizenshipAmerican
Education
Spouse(s)Peter Piot
Scientific career
FieldsAnthropology
Institutions
Websitewww.lshtm.ac.uk/aboutus/people/larson.heidi

Education and early career

The daughter of a priest and civil rights advocate, Larson grew up in Massachusetts.[5]

Larson worked for Save the Children in the West Bank and in Nepal after college. Working abroad got her interested in anthropology and she eventually graduated from the University of California in that discipline. She earned a Ph.D. in 1990. She worked for several companies in the 1990s, including Apple and Xerox. She went to UNICEF to study the impact of fax machines on how employees accomplish their work.[6]

Work in immunisation

Larson went back to UNICEF in 2000, working on global communications for several of the agency's vaccination programs. She developed an expertise on working with local health workers to defuse rumors that threatened to derail vaccination initiatives. She founded the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, which she still runs as of 2020, in addition to teaching anthropology, Risk and Decision Science.[6][7][8][9][10][11][12]

Since 2005, Larson has been leading a European Union project to support vaccination efforts in Sierra Leone, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, identifying and countering rumours that may reduce the effectiveness of the campaign. After working on ebola vaccination, the group is now debunking myths about the flu and COVID-19.[6]

Larson is Director of European Initiatives at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington.[13] Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, she co-chaired (alongside J. Stephen Morrison) the CSIS-LSHTM High-Level Panel on Vaccine Confidence and Misinformation in 2020.[14]

Describing herself as "a patient optimist", Larson understood early that significant efforts had to be made to fight misinformation about vaccines. Former UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said Larson "wasn't yelling 'The sky is falling', she was yelling, 'The sky could fall if we don't do something'".[6]


Personal life

Professor Larson is married to the Belgian virologist Peter Piot.[15]

Selected publications
  • Larson, Heidi J. (2020). Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start and Why They Don't Go Away. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190077242.
  • de Figueiredo, Alexandre; Simas, Clarissa; Karafillakis, Emilie; Paterson, Pauline; Larson, Heidi (September 10, 2020). "Mapping global trends in vaccine confidence and investigating barriers to vaccine uptake: a large-scale retrospective temporal modelling study". The Lancet. 396 (10255): 898–908. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31558-0.
  • Larson, Heidi J.; Figueiredo, Alexandre de; Xiahong, Zhao; Schulz, William S.; Verger, Pierre; Johnston, Iain G.; Cook, Alex R.; Jones, Nick S. (October 1, 2016). "The State of Vaccine Confidence 2016: Global Insights Through a 67-Country Survey". EBioMedicine. 12: 295–301. doi:10.1016/j.ebiom.2016.08.042. ISSN 2352-3964. PMC 5078590. PMID 27658738.

References
  1. "About : The Vaccine Confidence Project". www.vaccineconfidence.org. Retrieved August 6, 2018.
  2. Larson et al., EBioMedicine, 2018.
  3. "SpeakerHeidiLarson". Women Leaders in Global Health. Retrieved August 6, 2018.
  4. "Stuck Heidi J. Larson". Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on October 19, 2020. Retrieved October 19, 2020.
  5. Das, Pamela (September 26, 2020). "Heidi Larson: shifting the conversation about vaccine confidence". The Lancet. 396 (10255). doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31612-3. Retrieved October 13, 2020.
  6. Anderson, Jenny (October 13, 2020). "She Hunts Viral Rumors About Real Viruses". The new York Times. Archived from the original on October 19, 2020. Retrieved October 19, 2020.
  7. "Heidi Larson". London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Retrieved August 6, 2018.
  8. Vaccines—Calling the Shots. PBS. August 26, 2015. Retrieved August 12, 2018.
  9. Chatterjee, Camille (August 2, 2017). "The Director of The Vaccine Confidence Project Separates Vaccination Fact From Fiction". Johnson & Johnson website. Retrieved August 12, 2018.
  10. Finnegan, Gary (April 26, 2018). "Rise in vaccine hesitancy related to pursuit of purity – Prof. Heidi Larson". horizon-magazine.eu.
  11. Cohen, Jon (September 8, 2016). "France most skeptical country about vaccine safety". Science. American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). doi:10.1126/science.aah7280. ISSN 0036-8075.
  12. Myers, Dayna (September 9, 2016). "Vaccine Confidence Varies Widely: Q&A with Heidi Larson". Global Health NOW. Retrieved August 12, 2018.
  13. "Heidi Larson | University of Washington – Department of Global Health". globalhealth.washington.edu. Retrieved August 6, 2018.
  14. Call to Action: CSIS-LSHTM High-Level Panel on Vaccine Confidence and Misinformation, October 19, 2020 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
  15. "Peter Piot - Out to stop the Ebola virus he found". Financial Times. October 3, 2014. Retrieved September 29, 2018.


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