On Friday, November 1, 2019, UCLA faculty members Timothy R. Tangherlini, Beth Glenn, Catherine Crespi, Roshan Bastani and Vwani Roychowdhury organized an all-day symposium, “Addressing the Vaccine Crisis: The Digital World, Big Data and Public Health”. This one-day symposium, hosted by UCLA faculty from Engineering, Humanities and Public Health and sponsored by IDRE, focused attention on this potentially broad-ranging crisis.

The symposium synthesized different perspectives on  the vaccine crisis and included  scholars from across the United States and various universities to discuss the issues surrounding this problem. Tangherlini mentioned that, “one of the most pressing challenges of our information society: how do we maintain coherent healthcare messaging surrounding a critical aspect of our public health programs in the context of rapidly proliferating narratives that have the potential for swaying the opinions and changing the behaviors of many of our citizens in ways that could be dangerous for some of the most vulnerable members of our society?” During the symposium, experts from the diverse fields from public health, data science, culture analytics, sociology, and law explored aspects of “anti-vaccination” ideologies and “vaccine hesitancy”, which The World Health Organization has identified as one of the top ten threats to global health.

Tangherlini added, “Workshops such as ours are an important brick in the edifice of building sound methods for detecting, understanding and ultimately developing messages for the various communities that need meaningful insight as they make family healthcare decisions.”

Read full abstracts from all presenters.