BONUS STSNewsRoom 1 Jasmine Chakravarty investigates vaccine hesitancy | WeAreSTS

As of November 2021, more than 46.4 million people in the UK have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine as part of the biggest mass-immunization programme the country has ever run. Most of us rushed to book our appointments as soon as we received a message, keen to protect ourselves from the virus. However, not everyone has been quite so confident in the vaccine. In this episode, Jasmine Chakravarty speaks to four UCL academics to learn more about vaccine hesitancy and the evolution of public messaging. She wants to know: what it is, which groups are hesitant and why, and how this hesitancy can best be approached Listen to leading researchers from the Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and other UCL departments who talk about hesitancy as a process and who try to better understand how engagement around this topic should work. Jasmine would like to thank her fantastic guests Professor Helen Bedford @HelenEBedford, Dr Stephen Hughes @stephenhues, Dr Katherine Woolf, and Professor Sarah Edwards. For more information on vaccine hesitancy visit: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/immunisation-vaccines/vaccine-hesitancy For more advice on how to talk to those who are hesitant, see: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/16/1032001/how-to-talk-to-unvaccinated-people To read Dr Katherine Woolf’s research paper ‘Dispel myths and build trust to combat vaccine hesitancy among ethnic minority health workers’, follow the link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666776221001575?via%3Dihub Find out more about vaccine hesitancy among ethnic minority groups in the UK: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-vaccines-f-%20idUSKBN2A925Q https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n513 To learn more about the ‘COVID-19 Wellbeing Study’ with which Professor Sarah Edwards is involved, follow: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/11/1/e043418.long For more information about UCL’s Master’s in Science Communication (MSc) https://ucl.ac.uk/sts/msc We also mentioned our annual newsletter, STS Alchemy. For your free copy, visit:  https://ucl.ac.uk/sts/alchemy   Featuring Interviewer and episode creator: Jasmine Chakravarty (UCL 2021) Host: Professor Joe Cain, Professor in History and Philosophy of Biology   Music credits “Rollin At 5,” by Kevin MacLeod https://filmmusic.io/song/5000-rollin-at-5 “Sweeter Vermouth,” by Kevin MacLeod https://filmmusic.io/song/4450-sweeter-vermouth License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/   Production information Jasmine edited and produced the main segments of this episode. The balance of editing and post-production by Professor Joe Cain.   Podcast information “WeAreSTS” is a production of the Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS) at University College London (UCL). To find out more, and to leave feedback about the show, visit us online: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/podcast STS Students and staff also can find on the website information about how to get involved with our programme. WeAreSTS producer is Professor Joe Cain. Twitter: @stsucl #WeAreSTS