As Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance announces its next five-year strategy, the SSRC’s Mercury Project explains the importance of building robust and science-informed vaccine demand chains to complement vaccine supply chains.
To build researchers’ communications skills, the Mercury Project recently organized two convenings featuring Ann Searight Christiano, director of the University of Florida’s Center for Public Interest Communications, and Estelle Willie, director of Health Policy and Communications at The Rockefeller Foundation. These sessions imparted valuable lessons on effective research communication.
The Mercury Project’s 18-team global research consortium is preparing to report findings and launch the next phase of its work. At an upcoming Solutions Summit in Nairobi, researchers and global health policy leaders will identify the most promising interventions to increase vaccine demand from the Mercury Project’s first phase of work, and will develop master protocol blueprints to evaluate those interventions across multiple diverse settings.
Researchers Fortunate Machingura and Leslie Nyoni explain how they are leading the Zimbabwe arm of a four-country study (that also includes Cote d’Ivoire, Malawi, and Senegal) to equip frontline health workers with new skills in empathetic personal communication and evaluate the impacts on vaccine uptake and trust.
Researchers Simon Chauchard and Sumitra Badrinathan explain how they are designing and testing one of the most ambitious media and science information literacy programs to date—with 14,000 students in Bihar, one of the lowest-income states in India.
Mercury Project directors Heather Lanthon and Rebecca Gluskin respond to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s annual letter laying out the foundation’s investment agenda. For successful programs to translate into meaningful change, philanthropies have to also invest in the social and behavioral science needed to scale those programs.
Mercury Project codirector Heather Lanthorn introduces the project’s newly updated Research Framework, a public good that supports researchers, funders, and policymakers by mapping intervention designs designed to increase vaccination demand and science-based decision-making along with policy-relevant outcomes of interest. The 18 teams in the Mercury Project Research Consortium—working in 18 countries around the world—use the framework in their projects.
Researcher Neil Lewis Jr. discusses how the SSRC’s Mercury Project‘s teams approach to research can improve the evidence generation process.
