Author and pediatrician Adam Ratner is joined by Sam Wang to discuss his recently published book "Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children's Health."
About the Book (from the publisher):
Every single child diagnosed with measles represents a system failure—an inexcusable unforced error. The technology to prevent essentially 100 percent of measles cases has been in our hands since before the moon landing. But this serious airborne disease, once seemingly defeated, is resurgent around the globe. Why, at a time when biomedical science is so advanced, do parents turn away from vaccination, endangering their own children and the health of the wider population?
Using a combination of patient narrative, historical analysis, and scientific research, Dr. Adam Ratner, pediatrician and infectious disease specialist, argues that the reawakening of measles and the subsequent coronavirus pandemic are bellwethers of forgotten knowledge—indicators of decaying trust in science and an underfunded public health infrastructure.
Trust in medicine and public health is at a nadir. Declining vaccine confidence threatens a global reemergence of other vaccine-preventable diseases in the coming years. Ratner details how solving these problems requires the use of literal and figurative “booster shots” to gather new knowledge and retain the crucial lessons of the past. Learning—and remembering—these lessons is our best hope for preparing for the next pandemic. With attention and care and the tools we already have, we can make the world much safer for children tomorrow than it is today.
About the Author:
Adam Ratner, MD, MPH, is a professor of pediatrics and microbiology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the director of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital and Bellevue Hospital Center. In addition to practicing medicine, Dr. Ratner directs an active research group and teaches students, residents, and other trainees. He speaks widely in both academic settings and news outlets on topics relevant to vaccination and infections in childhood. His work has appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, PNAS, Pediatrics, and other venues. He edits a major textbook of pediatric infectious diseases, has chaired grant review panels for the National Institutes of Health, and serves on numerous advisory and editorial boards.
About the Moderator:
Sam Wang, Ph.D. is a professor of neuroscience at Princeton University. Professor Wang has over three decades of experience translating data and science into knowledge and practical action. With degrees in physics and neuroscience, Professor Wang’s laboratory research focuses on how the brain learns from birth to adulthood. He is the author of two award-winning popular books about the brain, which have been translated into over 20 languages. Professor Wang also does research on national and local elections, on subjects ranging from gerrymandering to ranked-choice voting. He now serves as the founding director of the Electoral Innovation Lab, whose mission is to build a practical science of democracy repair.
