A Clinical Trial is the Definition of Vaccine Skepticsm.

by Jon Scaccia December 6, 2024

Next Week in Public Health, December 6, 2024

After a month of discouragement and avoiding the news, I’ve been back at monitoring what’s going on from a policy perspective in the US. Obviously, the big change is the incoming administration and what several, eh, sketchy picks for different agency heads might have for public health.

There will definitely be an increase in vaccine skepticism, and we can predict that it will trickle down to all sorts of agencies. (However, I saw a great comment online a few months ago: “You want vaccine skepticism. That’s what a clinical trial is!”). Being critical is the hallmark of good science, but we also don’t want to reinvent the wheel over and over and want people to be able to benefit from the good things that are coming on.

I shared the following figure over at our sister site, This Week in Science, and I think it’s instructive here as well. This is from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and looks at where significant developments have been in the field and where there is a risk of one country dominating the technological landscape. Since we know that Trump is highly anti-China, will we see additional investment in these areas from an NIH and NSF perspective?

Something to keep an eye on as many of these domains abso-freaking-lutely intersect with public health.

Here’s what we have coming next week in Public Health.

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