14. Vaccine Policies: Boosters and Mandates

As governments around the world try to get their countries and economies back on track, they are starting to desperately implement a number of vaccine policies that have sometimes been questioned by society and scientists. In this episode, experts discuss the rationale around boosters, who should get them, when they are the most effective and the problems around offering third doses to individuals when many vulnerable people around the globe are still fighting for their first. Experts also talk about mandates and the debate around forcing the previously infected to be fully immunized when the data suggests otherwise. They also discuss possible mandates for children and schools, vaccine passports to live general life and cross borders as well as different countries discriminating against which vaccines are acceptable for a passport. Finally, experts talk about whether it makes scientific sense to implement such strict mandates at this stage of the pandemic given the shifting understanding around how these vaccines are actually working among communities. With the current problem of global vaccine inequity, experts question whether such mandates implemented by rich countries are ethical and fair.

Expert guests:

-- Dr Monica Gandhi is Professor of Medicine and Associate Division Chief (Clinical Operations/Education) of the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine at University California San Francisco/San Francisco General Hospital. -- Dr Nikolai Petrovsky is Professor of Medicine, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia and vice-president and secretary-general of the International Immunomics Society. He is the founder of vaccine biotech, Vaxine, which has a protein based vaccine for Covid-19 in its pipeline. -- Dr Jeffrey Morris is Professor of Biostatistics and Director, Biostatistics Division at the University of Pennsylvania, US. His research focuses on developing quantitative methods to extract knowledge from biomedical big data and he set up a blog dedicated to issues concerning the Covid-19 pandemic. -- Dr. Nadia Sam-Agudu is Associate Professor of Pediatrics (Immunology/Infectious Diseases) at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and Senior Technical Advisor at the Institute of Human Virology Nigeria. She conducts public health and implementation research in maternal and child health, with a focus on HIV and other major infectious diseases in African countries. -- Dr Miguel O'Ryan is Professor of Microbiology and Mycology, Faculty of Medicine at the University of Chile, where is also Director of International Affairs. His research focuses on molecular and clinical aspects of enteric disease, pediatric vaccines and infection of the immunocompromised host. -- Dr Andrew Read is Professor of Biology and Entomology at PennState University, US. His research specializes in the ecology and evolutionary genetics of infectious disease, which includes the impact of vaccination on virus evolution.