In 2016 he and colleagues from Emory University published a study estimating the number of children and teenagers who are unprotected against measles. Saad Omer has been worrying about the growing number of measles-susceptible people in this country for a while. He added that national and state monitoring is not enough to effectively monitor infectious disease more needs to be done on the local and county level.Īs measles cases spread, the tinder for more outbreaks is growingĭr. “All disease transmission is local, just like politics,” said Saad Omer, a professor in global health and epidemiology at Emory University in Atlanta and one of the study authors. It’s these local clusters of vaccinations that put a specific community or school at the greatest risk, according to the study, which linked large measles outbreaks across the United States to “declining population vaccination and to voluntary abstention from measles vaccine.” But the law was not as effective in private schools, and did little to break up localized clusters of children who opted out of vaccines. What’s happened since California let fewer families reject vaccinesĪ California law that aims to limit the number of people who can refuse vaccines has led to a slight improvement in kindergartners’ vaccination rate in recent years, according to a new study in Health Affairs. “We’ll have to have evidence-based approaches to dealing with this,” Omer says. Only by actually studying the issue will we figure out how to increase vaccination rates. What we need instead, he explains, is to demand the same rigor in studying the social science side of vaccine hesitancy as we do for every other area of science. “People don’t feel entitled to talk about the microbiology of a virus without having enough experience, but anyone with an advanced degree feels entitled to talk about vaccine acceptance.” In other words, doctors and virologists shouldn't talk about vaccination efforts as if they're experts on how to persuade uncertain parents. “There’s a little bit of a Dunning-Kruger effect going on where knowing a little bit about it means we think we know a lot more than we do,” says Saad Omer, an epidemiologist and vaccinologist at Emory University who regularly serves on advisory boards for vaccine-preventable diseases. Public health officials have learned some lessons from their own efforts to increase vaccination rates, but that’s not the same thing as truly understanding what works and what doesn’t. His work has also included public health preparedness strategies to effectively respond to large emerging and re-emerging infectious disease outbreaks.ĭr Omer is a member of the WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) Working Group on COVID-19 Vaccines, the Co-Chair of the Lancet Commission on Vaccine Hesitancy in the US, a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Committee on Equitable Allocation of Vaccines for the Novel Coronavirus, serves on the National Vaccine Advisory Committee (NVAC) Working Group for Vaccine Hesitancy and is on the Board of Trustees for the Sabin Vaccine Institute.We’re finally studying how to combat the anti-vax movement, but the methods may surprise you ĭespite anti-vax movements being nearly as old as the first vaccine, there hasn’t been much research at all on how to convince parents to vaccinate. Moreover, he has conducted several studies on interventions to increase immunisation coverage and acceptance. He is also a fellow of the Infectious Disease Society of America.ĭr Omer’s research portfolio includes epidemiology of respiratory viruses such as influenza, RSV, and SARS-Cov-2 (COVID-19) clinical trials to estimate efficacy of maternal and/or infant influenza, pertussis, polio, measles and pneumococcal vaccines and trials to evaluate drug regimens to reduce mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Dr Omer received his medical degree, MBBS, from The Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan and received his MPH and PhD in Global Disease Epidemiology and Control from Johns Hopkins University. He is also a Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) at Yale School of Medicine and the Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale School of Public Health. Omer is the inaugural Director of the Yale Institute for Global Health. Director, Yale Institute for Global Health
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