Vaccines are in the news every day as some countries struggle to improve vaccination rates and others struggle to access vaccines. A social science approach is needed to further explore what actions can be taken to optimize vaccine acceptance during a disease outbreak, with immediate lessons for the COVID-19 pandemic. Social science can highlight histories of oppression, political-economic contexts that exacerbate inequality, and how communities experience injustice with implications for how...

In January 2021, the WHO Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated that “we now face the real danger that even as vaccines bring hope to some, they become another brick in the wall of inequality between the world’s haves and have-nots” and that “the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure” because of this. We know that the health of all countries depends on fully managing the pandemic everywhere and that a lack of vaccine equity across and within nations will have...

The COVID-19 pandemic has been unprecedented for the amount of data which is produced daily about the disease and for controversies over evidence, predictions and ‘misinformation’. Indeed, in February 2020 the WHO Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, declared ‘We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic’. In this episode we explore the social life of COVID-19 data, going beyond debates about the accuracy of data to discuss how data it is used to tell stories,...

This special Sonar-Global Epicast about antimicrobial resistance is a follow-up on the Sonar-Global Special-SOC AMR curriculum development meeting held in October 2019 in Amsterdam. In the podcast, a number of participants share their thoughts on the question why it is important to integrate the social sciences in AMR. Background music with courtesy of Biota Beats (http://biotabeats.org/) Speakers Anthony Billaud Anthony Billaud is graduated from Institut d'études politiques (IEP) and from...

Epicast is a podcast series about epidemics from Sonar-Global. The aim of this podcast is to explore the social dimensions of infectious diseases outbreaks so that we can get better at controlling them. For this first episode, we will be focusing on the Coronavirus outbreak. Speakers Annie Wilkinson Annie Wilkinson is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. She is an anthropologist and health systems researcher working on: zoonotic disease; epidemic...