Epicast Epicast by Sonar-Global

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 individuals view, trust, and take up vaccines. In this Epicast, we explore social science perspectives on vaccine deployment through the lens of Project AViD: Anthropological Exploration of Facilitators and Barriers to Vaccine Deployment and Administration During Disease Outbreaks.

Music Credits to Joseph McDade https://josephmcdade.com/music  – track names “Sunrise Expedition” and “Quiet Calculation”
EPICAST is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and Google Podcast.
Speakers
Dr Schmidt-Sane

Dr Schmidt-Sane is a medical anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher in the Health & Nutrition cluster at the Institute of Development Studies. Her work is currently on the Social Science in Humanitarian Action Platform (SSHAP), which brings together social scientists, public health and humanitarian practitioners to address the social dimensions of epidemic and humanitarian crises. Her research focuses on the social science of epidemics in both informal settlements and border areas.

Professor Shelley Lees

Professor Shelley Lees is leading on anthropological research alongside two Ebola vaccine trials (EBOVAC and PREVAC) in Sierra Leone. She is also principal investigator on the AViD study. She is work package lead for the ALERRT consortium, focusing on social science and community engagement for research and response to epidemics, and the EBOVAC3 consortium where she is leading research on community preparedness and acceptability of vaccine deployment for future epidemics in Sierra Leone, Guinea and DRC. She is the co-Chair of the GOARN Social Science Research Group.

Dr Alex Bowmer

Dr Alex Bowmer is leading the AViD Uganda case study that explores how local knowledge of vaccines is constructed and communicated. This research explores the cross-overs between human and veterinary medicine, as it seeks to establish whether negative experiences with veterinary vaccines amongst rural subsistence livestock farmers in the South of Uganda affects human uptake. His research will also assist with the roll-out of the new Rift Valley Fever vaccine, as this case study will examine the acceptability of a OneHealth vaccine.

Dr Lys Alcayna-Stevens

Dr Lys Alcayna-Stevens is a medical anthropologist whose work focuses on local political economies of epidemic disease outbreaks in rural Democratic Republic of Congo. She is a lecturer at the New School for Social Research in New York, and a Research Fellow in the Anthropology Department of Harvard University, working on postdoctoral research projects based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg. She also conducts policy-oriented qualitative and quantitative research in central Africa for the UN and other international health and environmental organizations.

Dr Luisa Enria

Dr Luisa Enria has conducted ethnographic research looking into community experiences of the West African Ebola outbreak and acceptability of biomedical interventions such as vaccine trials. Her current work explores local experiences of “crisis” and the ways in which the militarised Ebola response shaped young people’s relationship with the state.

Dr Samantha Vanderslott

Dr Samantha Vanderslott is a social science researcher as part of the Oxford Martin School Programme: ‘The “Human Factor”: Infectious Disease and Collective Responsibility’. She is researching parental attitudes and decisions on vaccination.

D

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 strategic and economic consequences for the entire world. In this Epicast, we explore social science perspectives on COVID-19 vaccine equity, from policy and social science questions around vaccine nationalism and COVAX, to issues of social justice.

Music Credits to Joseph McDade https://josephmcdade.com/music  – track names “Sunrise Expedition” and “Quiet Calculation”
EPICAST is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and Google Podcast.
Speakers
Prof Godwell Nhamo

Godwell Nhamo (PhD Rhodes University), is a Full Professor, Chief Researcher and Exxaro Chair in Business and Climate Change at the University of South Africa (UNISA). He is a National Research Foundation C-Rated researcher undertaking research in the fields of COVID-19, Climate Change and Governance, Climate Change and Tourism, Green Economy and Sustainable Development. Prof Nhamo has conceptualised and successfully completed 11 book projects (8 edited and 3 co-authored). The most recent being, “Counting the Cost of COVID-19 on the Global Tourism Industry.” Prof Nhamo has published over 95 journal articles, and since 2013, graduated 11 PhDs and hosted 11 postdoctoral fellows. Currently, Prof Nhamo is leading a large research project on Cyclones and Floods in the era of SDGs in Southern Africa. Finally, Prof Nhamo was one of the four-member African Union High Level Panel drafting the Green Innovation Framework for the continent. He is also one of the experts for the Non-economic Losses (NELs) Group under the UNFCCC Warsaw International Mechanisms on Loss and Damage.

Dr Pedro Villarreal

Dr Villarreal is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. He is manager of the project “International Health Governance.” In 2017, he received the prize for the best doctoral dissertation in law and social sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico for his work, “Pandemics and Law: A Global Governance Perspective.”

Dr Salla Sariola

Dr Sariola works in the field intersecting Sociology, Global Health, Gender and Queer Studies, Bioethics, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). She currently leads the Social Study of Microbes group at Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland which is a world unique research group focusing on social aspects of antimicrobial resistance, environmental microbiology and lay perceptions and practices of microbes. She is the author of, for example, “Research as Development: Biomedical Research, Ethics and Collaboration in Sri Lanka and Politics and Ethics of Community Engagement in Global Health Research.”

Dr Emily Brunson

Dr Brunson, a medical anthropologist, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Texas State University. Her research focuses on health care access and decision-making, and particularly how policies, social structures (including class and racial inequalities), social networks, and personal experience combine to produce health outcomes for individuals. In collaboration with diverse stakeholders, Dr Brunson has translated scholarly research into actionable recommendations for both practitioners and policymakers. She is committed to applying the theories, methods, and findings of social science to address health-related issues including COVID-19 vaccination uptake.

Dr Megan Schmidt-Sane

Dr Schmidt-Sane is a medical anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher in the Health & Nutrition cluster a

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, what is counted and what is not counted, as well as hearing about ongoing research into the infodemic.

Reference to the John’s Hopkins COVID-19 map mentioned in the podcast https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

Music Credits to Joseph McDade https://josephmcdade.com/music  - track name ‘Sunrise Expedition’
EPICAST is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and Google Podcast.
Speakers
Mark Davis

Mark David McGregor Davis (PhD, London), leads social research on health and illness, pharmaceuticals and ehealth. His interdisciplinary approach combines narrative methods for the social sciences, social public health, and science and technology studies. His research has been supported by research council, government and non-government organisations, including the Australian Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council (UK), Health Protection Scotland, National Health Promotion Information Service (UK), and Terrence Higgins Trust in Scotland and England.Mark is a member of the Public Health Association of Australia, the British Sociological Association and the International Sociological Association.

Joel Selanikio

Dr. Joel Selanikio is a physician, TED speaker, inventor, emergency responder, and consultant working in the fields of technology, healthcare, artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship, social innovation, big data, child health, and disaster response. A founding member of the World Health Organization’s Digital Health Roster of Experts, he is the winner of both the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award for Healthcare and the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainable Innovation for the development of the Magpi mobile data collection system, the first cloud-based application created for global health and international development. An emergency responder and former CDC epidemiologist and outbreak investigator, in December 2014 - January 2015, he was the lead physician at the IMC Ebola Treatment Center at Lunsar, Sierra Leone. As an officer of the Public Health Service, Dr. Selanikio served as Chief of Operations for the HHS Secretary's Emergency Command Center after the 9/11 attacks. In 2005, he was given the Haverford Award for Humanitarian Service for his work in treating tsunami victims in Aceh.

Tamara Giles-Vernick

Dr. Tamara Giles-Vernick is coordinator of Sonar-Global. She is Director of Research and Unit head of the Anthropology and Ecology of Disease Emergence Unit – the Institut Pasteur’s first social sciences research unit. A specialist in the medical anthropology and history of central and west Africa, her current research focuses on emerging zoonotic diseases and epidemics. She is conducting a national study for preparedness and response for UNICEF in the Central African Republic. She also directs the MICROTONE study, which offers a pre-history of zoonotic disease emergence; the study brings together anthropological-historical analyses with comparisons of microbial and viral profiles among people, domesticated animals and wild animals along an ecological gradient in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She has also led a three-country study on the anthropology, history and geography of human-nonhuman primate contact and emerging zoonotic diseases in central Africa. In addition, she has published on viral hepatitis (diagnostics, linkage to care, vaccination), Ebola, Buruli ulcer, the historical emergence of HIV in Africa, global health in Africa, the history of influenza pandemi

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/)
EPICAST is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and Google Podcast.
Speakers
Anthony Billaud

Anthony Billaud is graduated from Institut d'études politiques (IEP) and from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) of Paris, France. With a Ph.D. in Socio-economics, he has mainly worked on public health programs in Africa (West, Central and Southern) for a diverse range of international organizations (NGOs, European Union, U.N., bilateral cooperations...). Specialized on epidemics, he successively worked on HIV/AIDS, post Ebola, maternal and infant care and health system strenghtening. He is now engaged on SoNAR-Global project in Dakar, Senegal, for the CRCF.

Louise Munkholm

Louise Munkholm is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Denmark. Her research interests include the sociology of international law and politics, legal cultural encounters, international migration and health crisis management. She holds a PhD in Global Studies and Sociology of Law based on her PhD project titled "Reinventing Tools for Labour Law Enforcement" with specific focus on analysing the promotion of workers' protection in Chinese firms in Prato, Italy. She is currently working on the research project “Exploring the policy dynamics of global antimicrobial resistance initiatives” funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.

John Paget

John Paget, PhD, is a senior scientist at Nivel with 30 years of experience in the field of infectious disease epidemiology. He has published extensively on the surveillance of influenza, burden of influenza, influenza vaccination and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). He has been a member of a number of WHO working groups and is the co-chairman of the Global Influenza and RSV initiative.

Nicolas Fortane

Nicolas is a sociologist at INRAE (French Institute for Agricultural and Environmental Research), in Paris-Dauphine University. His research focuses on the construction of the AMR public problem in agriculture, the regulation and circulation of veterinary pharmaceuticals and the transformations of farm animal veterinary medicine. He is currently PI of two grants: a project on the evolution of the French veterinary profession and veterinary drug market (AMAGRI, Antimicrobials in agriculture – 2019-2022); and a European H2020 grant which is an interdisciplinary project including 10 countries in Europe, Asia and Africa (ROADMAP, Rethinking of antimicrobial decision-systems in the management of animal production – 2019-2023). Nicolas currently also works as honorary assistant professor at The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine with the AMIS research group.

Further information on Nicolas is available on his institutional profile and his professional blog.

Stephanie Begemann

After graduating as a veterinarian in 2009 at the University of Ghent, Belgium, I worked for three years as a veterinarian in Aruba and in the Netherlands. I decided in 2013 to enrol in the master medical anthropology and sociology at the University of Amsterdam to better understand and manage veterinary public health issues. My master thesis studied the implementation of Dutch antibiotic agricultural policies, after which I became highly interested in the co-production between political cultures and agricultural antibiotic infrastructures. I have been able to continue this interest in my PhD in which I approached antibiotic use in the UK dairy industry as a practice beyond behaviour and study it as the complex interplay between politics, ma

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.
EPICAST is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and Google Podcast.
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 preparedness and control; drug resistance; and urban health. She has worked extensively in West Africa, especially Sierra Leone, and within emergency humanitarian and epidemic response. Her recent research explores health in informal urban settlements and the governance of infection control in complex and rapidly changing health and socio-ecological systems.

Arnaud Fontanet

Arnaud Fontanet is a medical epidemiologist (MD Paris V; DrPH, Harvard School of Public Health, 1993) specialized in infectious diseases epidemiology.  In 2002, he joined Institut Pasteur in Paris to launch the Emerging Diseases Epidemiology unit.  There, his focus has been on viral hepatitis and emerging viruses. In 2014, he was appointed as Director of the newly created Centre for Global Health at Institut Pasteur. Arnaud Fontanet is also Professor of Public Health at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, where he is Director and co-founder of the Pasteur-Cnam School of Public Health, and was named in 2018-19 Guest Public Health Professor at the Collège de France.


Biao Xiang

Biao Xiang is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford, specializing in migration and social changes in Asia. He is the author of Making Money from Making Order (forthcoming); Global “Body Shopping”; Transcending Boundaries; Return: Nationalizing Transnational Mobility in Asia (lead editor) and numerous articles in both English and Chinese. A number of articles have been translated into Japanese, French, Korean, Spanish and Italian.



Clare Wenham


Clare Wenham is Assistant Professor of Global Health Policy at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her work falls in the cross-over between global health, international relations and epidemiology, focusing in particular on global health security thorough analysis of the Zika and Ebola outbreaks, and more broadly on the governance structures of disease control. Her work features in The Lancet, BMJ, Security Dialogue, International Affairs, BMJ Global Health and Third World Quarterly. At LSE she is the director of the MSc in Global Health Policy at LSE and sits on the steering committee of the LSE Global Health Initiative.

Clare is currently leading a Wellcome Trust funded project to understand the impact of the Zika outbreak on how women access abortion, and in particular medical abortion, and how national regulation in Brazil, Colombia and El Salvador impacted on women’s choices and abortion service providers activity during the health emergency. Clare is also completing a book manuscript offering a feminist critique of global health security through analysis of the Zika outbreak.

She previously worked at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, delivering projects relating to surveillance and transmission of infectious disease. Prior to this she undertook a PhD at the Centre for Health and International Relations at Aberystwyth University examining the tensions between global disease governance and individual state sovereignty. During this time, she was awarded fellowship at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, and consulted for the Asian Development Bank. Before starting her academic career, Clare worked in public health policy roles at the Faculty of Public Health and for an NHS Trust.

Leesa Lin

Leesa Lin is a Assistant Professor at the London School of Hygiene &