The daughter of a priest and civil rights advocate, Larson grew up in Massachusetts.[6]
Larson worked for Save the Children in the West Bank and in Nepal after college. Working abroad got her interested in anthropology and she eventually graduated from the University of California in that discipline. She earned a Ph.D. in 1990. She worked for several companies in the 1990s, including Apple and Xerox. [7]
Work in immunisationedit
Larson went back to UNICEF in 2000, working on global communications for several of the agency's vaccination programs. She developed an expertise on working with local health workers to defuse rumors that threatened to derail vaccination initiatives. She founded the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, which she still runs as of 2020, in addition to teaching anthropology, Risk and Decision Science.[7][8][9][10][11][12][13]
Larson is Director of European Initiatives at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington.[14] Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, she co-chaired (alongside J. Stephen Morrison) the CSIS-LSHTM High-Level Panel on Vaccine Confidence and Misinformation in 2020.[15]
Describing herself as "a patient optimist", Larson understood early that significant efforts had to be made to fight misinformation about vaccines. Former UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said Larson "wasn't yelling 'The sky is falling', she was yelling, 'The sky could fall if we don't do something'".[7]
In a paper published in February 2021, Larson acknowledged extensive collaboration with, advisory board membership of, and funding from, vaccine manufacturers, especially the pharmaceutical companies GlaxoSmithKline and Merck & Co. Inc.[16] She was recognized as one of the BBC's 100 women of 2021.[17]
Other activitiesedit
Virchow Prize for Global Health, Member of the Council (2022–present)[18]
Personal lifeedit
Larson is married to the Belgian virologist Peter Piot.[19]
Selected publicationsedit
Scholia has a profile for Heidi Larson (Q21238913).
de Figueiredo, Alexandre; Simas, Clarissa; Karafillakis, Emilie; Paterson, Pauline; Larson, Heidi (September 10, 2020). "Mapping global trends in vaccine confidence and investigating barriers to vaccine uptake: a large-scale retrospective temporal modelling study". The Lancet. 396 (10255): 898–908. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31558-0. PMC7607345. PMID 32919524.
Larson, Heidi J.; Figueiredo, Alexandre de; Xiahong, Zhao; Schulz, William S.; Verger, Pierre; Johnston, Iain G.; Cook, Alex R.; Jones, Nick S. (October 1, 2016). "The State of Vaccine Confidence 2016: Global Insights Through a 67-Country Survey". eBioMedicine. 12: 295–301. doi:10.1016/j.ebiom.2016.08.042. ISSN 2352-3964. PMC5078590. PMID 27658738.
Referencesedit
^"About : The Vaccine Confidence Project". www.vaccineconfidence.org. Retrieved August 6, 2018.
^"SpeakerHeidiLarson". Women Leaders in Global Health. Retrieved August 6, 2018.
^"Stuck Heidi J. Larson". Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on October 19, 2020. Retrieved October 19, 2020.
^"BBC 100 Women 2021: Who is on the list this year?". BBC News. December 7, 2021. Retrieved December 16, 2022.
^Das, Pamela (September 26, 2020). "Heidi Larson: shifting the conversation about vaccine confidence". The Lancet. 396 (10255): 877. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31612-3. PMID 32919523.
^ abcdAnderson, Jenny (October 13, 2020). "She Hunts Viral Rumors About Real Viruses". The new York Times. Archived from the original on October 19, 2020. Retrieved October 19, 2020.
^"Heidi Larson". London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Retrieved August 6, 2018.
^Vaccines—Calling the Shots. PBS. August 26, 2015. Retrieved August 12, 2018.
^Chatterjee, Camille (August 2, 2017). "The Director of The Vaccine Confidence Project Separates Vaccination Fact From Fiction". Johnson & Johnson website. Retrieved August 12, 2018.
^Finnegan, Gary (April 26, 2018). "Rise in vaccine hesitancy related to pursuit of purity – Prof. Heidi Larson". horizon-magazine.eu.
^Cohen, Jon (September 8, 2016). "France most skeptical country about vaccine safety". Science. American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). doi:10.1126/science.aah7280. ISSN 0036-8075.
^Myers, Dayna (September 9, 2016). "Vaccine Confidence Varies Widely: Q&A with Heidi Larson". Global Health NOW. Retrieved August 12, 2018.
^"Heidi Larson | Department of Health Metrics Sciences". depts.washington.edu. Retrieved August 6, 2018.
^Loomba, Sahil (February 21, 2021). "Measuring the impact of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on vaccination intent in the UK and USA". Nature Human Behaviour. 5 (7): 960. doi:10.1038/s41562-021-01172-y. PMC8264480. PMID 34239082. S2CID 256703444.
^"BBC 100 Women 2021: Who is on the list this year?". BBC News. December 7, 2021. Retrieved December 16, 2022.
^"Peter Piot - Out to stop the Ebola virus he found". Financial Times. October 3, 2014. Retrieved September 29, 2018.
External linksedit
Morrison, J. Stephen (September 17, 2010). "Transcript: Interview with Dr. Heidi Larson, Executive Director of the aids2031 Project". Center for Strategic and International Studies.