The History and Future of Planetary Threats
Crisis communications and vaccine uptake in fragile African settings: What Works?
Wednesday March 31, 2021
8:30am - 12 Noon ET (New York)
As the COVID-19 vaccine campaign moves worldwide, innovative approaches to vaccine campaigns are badly needed. How to build trust in vaccines among a weary, anxious and often skeptical public? Join us for a conversation among African and US policymakers, activists, nursing leaders and academics to dissect the elements of effective risk communications campaigns, with an emphasis on empowering individuals and communities to lead the charge.
Two recent Columbia University studies offer insights into community-based risk communication models. On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics documents the leading role nurses played during the Ebola outbreak in Liberia and Sierra Leone (2014-2016) and the COVID19 outbreak in New York City (2020). 1 A recent review of COVID19 pandemic responses in Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa launched by WHO DG Tedros at the Schmidt-Futures Forum January 12 2021 reveals how community health workers and nurses have emerged as the most trusted and effective risk communicators – precisely because they are part of the communities they care for, and demonstrably place their own lives on the line.
The challenges at this juncture are complex. Vaccines cannot displace public health and social measures. Communications must be tailored to the audience, and calibrated to context, country and culture. The recent proliferation of SARS-COV-2 variants presents novel hazards. We must listen continuously and specifically to local responses to vaccine communications and administration protocols. At the heart of any possible success will be trust, and trust must emerge from honest, evidence-based risk communication conveyed by individuals and leaders who have earned the confidence of the communities they serve.
Speakers:
Natalia Kanem, United Nations Population Fund
Wilmot James, ISERP, Columbia University
James Oladipo Ayodele, Africa CDC
Donda Hansen, US CDC
Jennifer Dohrn, Columnia University, School of Nursing
Chinwe Lucia Ochu, Nigerian CDC
Stefano Cordella, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent
Sheila Davis, Partners in Health
Richard Garfield, US CDC
Victoria Rosner, Columbia University, English and Comparative Literature
Madeline Drexler, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Mark Heywood, Daily Maverick (South Africa)
Welcomes from:
Murugi Ndirangu, Columbia Global Center Nairobi
Youssef Cherif, Columbia Global Center Tunis
ISERP Series: The History and Future of Planetary Threats
In this series, ISERP convenes meetings to examine the history of and conteporary catastrophic risks and hazards, whether natural, accident or deliberate, in the following domains: geological, biological, epidemic infectious disease, environmental, chemical, extreme weather, radiological and nuclear, or combinations of these. By catastrophic we understand to mean classes of events that could lead to sudden, extraordinary, widespread disaster beyond the collective capacity of national and international organizations and the private sector to control, causing severe disruptions in normal social functioning, heavy tolls in terms of morbidity and mortality, and major economic losses; in sum, events that may well cause a change the direction of history. Nuclear falls into a class of its own, because it can result in the annihilation of life on planet earth and the end of history as we know it.
This event is co-sponsored by:
Center for Pandemic Research at the Institute for Social Research and Policy (ISERP)
Frontline Nurses: Center for the Study of Social Difference
School of Nursing
Program in Vaccine Education, Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
Columbia Global Centers-Nairobi and Tunis
Earth Institute
Academy of Political Science
