Rishi Goyal and Dennis Tenen interviewed for Columbia News on Vaccine Hesistancy
Increasing COVID-19 Vaccine Confidence project leaders, Professors Rishi Goyal and Dennis Tenen sat with Columbia News for a Q&A session on how they plan to use AI, data science, and comparative literature to understand why people are often afraid and distrustful of vaccinations and how to convince them otherwise.
Q: How did you decide to put into practice your seemingly disparate disciplines in this project?
Rishi Goyal: We thought it’d be great to develop a lab or research project in which we could show that working in these different disciplines—literature, medicine, data science—will provide greater insights.
Dennis Tenen: When you look at the real world, it doesn’t have neat boundaries. It’s metaphor. It’s policy. It’s data. It’s medicine. This is a project that shows that the multiplicity of expertise can better address real world problems.
Q: How did you start this project? What is the issue at the heart of it?
Tenen: We met a few years ago, before COVID. We were looking at hesitancy around the measles vaccine. At the time, the United States was in danger of losing its measles elimination status according to the WHO (World Health Organization). We were also thinking about the various ways in which language shapes our perception of illness and health. Then we started to look at the way people express hesitancy online, and in literature and in the news. As we were thinking about this, the COVID pandemic happened, and the issue of vaccine hesitancy became more pressing.
Goyal: In some ways, the issue is very basic. We are both very interested in the root causes as to why people remain vaccine hesitant, particularly in this historical moment of this pandemic. We believe that if we begin to truly understand the individual reasons for why people are vaccine hesitant, we’ll be able to promote vaccine confidence and build trust and get people to the point where they will seek to be vaccinated. Getting high uptake of vaccines, we believe, is the largest driver to return the world back to some semblance of normalcy.
