London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Available now, the new season of LSHTM Viral will explore issues and answer key questions on COVID-19 vaccines.

The first episode explores the importance of vaccines in unlocking the UK and the rest of the world. We chat to Prof John Edmunds, a professor of infectious disease modelling at LSHTM and member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), as well as Dr Rosalind Eggo, who has worked extensively on COVID-19 transmission and public health interventions in the UK and internationally.

The second episode launched this week walks the listener through the history of how vaccines came to be, with Dr Gareth Millward from the University of Warwick and a former Research Fellow with the Centre for History in Public Health at LSHTM, alongside Prof Liam Smeeth, Dean of the Faculty of Epidemiology & Population Health and a GP in London.

In fortnightly episodes, the rest of the series will feature leading scientists from LSHTM and other renowned institutions who will take listeners through the history of the first vaccines, how they’re created in the lab, tested for safety, and manufactured at scale.

We’ll also explore issues surrounding the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, including the concerning rise of vaccine nationalism. Listeners will hear from experts on vaccine hesitancy, who will tease apart the complex factors that affect public trust in medicine, including misinformation and marginalised communities.

The podcast team wants to hear questions and concerns members of the public may have about the new vaccines. Email your queries to comms@lshtm.ac.uk, and health experts will answer as many questions as they can during each episode.

This series follows on from the extremely successful first and second seasons of LSHTM Viral, which discussed the outbreak of COVID-19, and the impact of climate change on our health. LSHTM Viral has had over 150,000 listeners in 170 countries, and is the 13^th most popular science podcast in the UK on Spotify.

If you haven’t listened before, there are almost 50 episodes available now for you to catch up on. You can subscribe on your favourite player, and don’t forget to rate us and leave a review on Apple podcasts, and share with your friends and family.

Listen now on: Anchor, Apple Podcasts, Breaker, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, RadioPublic, Spotify or Stitcher.