We’re well into the COVID vaccine rollout, and if you have more questions than ever, you’re not alone.
On Monday, March 15, Berkeley Events and the UC Berkeley School of Public Health invited four experts to a virtual public forum to discuss the ongoing vaccination strategy, focusing especially on questions of vaccine access, safety, and the results we’re seeing so far.
Posted on March 31, 2021 - 12:05pm
As much as anyone in the world, Berkeley anthropology alumna Heidi Larson is confronted by public resistance to the COVID-19 vaccines. Larson is founder and director of the London-based Vaccine Confidence Project, a nonprofit that conducts global surveys monitoring public confidence in immunization programs. With the Project, Larson helps quantify vaccine approval by measuring people’s confidence in the importance, safety, and effectiveness of vaccines.
Posted on March 23, 2021 - 10:39am
UC Berkeley Public Health Clinical Professor Emeritus John Swartzberg is one of the nation’s leading authorities on infectious diseases and vaccinology—and an eloquent commentator on all things pathogenic, including the novel coronavirus. California caught up with him recently to get his views on the likely directions of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the prospects for a vaccine, and the American response to date.
Posted on October 27, 2020 - 3:43pm
Elena Conis is a historian of U.S. public health and medicine, with a special focus on the history of infectious disease, environmental health, and vaccines.
Ever since Bay Area school districts announced they would begin the fall 2020 school year with distance learning due to the still-increasing rate of COVID-19 infection across the region, parents have been scrambling to figure out how to manage their children’s schooling.
Posted on September 3, 2020 - 10:28am
From the beginning, it was an ambitious idea. Computer automation would remove the taint of human emotion or prejudice from everyday life. Algorithms—the series of instructions that tell computers what to do—would make important decisions about everything from hiring to health care.
The reality, as Ziad Obermeyer discovered, is not quite that simple.
Posted on August 12, 2020 - 12:27pm
Ray Durham, a law student at UC Berkeley, had a decision to make: break the law and risk his life, or abandon a protest about proving that it matters.
Posted on July 7, 2020 - 12:20pm
“The future will not, in crucial ways, be anything like the past, even the very recent past of a month or two ago,” the author Rebecca Solnit, M.A. ’84, wrote of the pandemic in the Guardian in early April. In a crisis, Solnit wrote, “Our focus shifts, and what matters shifts. What is weak breaks under new pressure, what is strong holds, and what was hidden emerges.”
As protests have swept the nation in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the call to defund and abolish the police has also swept social media and marched its way into the national dialogue.
Posted on June 16, 2020 - 11:39am
LATELY, I’VE BEEN COLLECTING NEWS of wildlife appearing in deserted towns and cities around the world: Wild goats roaming shuttered Welsh villages, jackals skulking in the streets of Tel Aviv, Indian bison ambling along vacant highways in New Delhi, coyotes howling in North Beach. As we shelter in place, the animals are rushing into the void. And not just the charismatic megafauna, either. Witness the legions of dumpster-deprived rats battling nightly on Bourbon Street.
The last literary essay I wrote was about dystopian fiction. At the time, in 2016, I had been struck by the publication, within the space of a few months, of a large number of novels offering visions of the future in which some catastrophe—climate change, natural disaster, financial collapse, a pandemic—destroys society as we know it, plunging humankind back into a nightmarish anti-Eden. I was curious about what such novels—written by authors who did not characteristically write science fiction—said about our current state of mind, our anxieties and fears.
Let me begin with heartfelt congratulations to the 2020 graduates of Berkeley who, like their peers across the country, were deprived of their commencement ceremonies by the coronavirus and the need for social distancing.
As the death toll for COVID-19 crosses 100,000 people in the United States—the highest number of any country in the world—African Americans continue to be disproportionately impacted by the virus. Nationally, African Americans are nearly twice as likely to die from COVID-19 as would be expected based on their share of the population according to an NPR analysis.
Posted on June 2, 2020 - 4:26pm
In January of 2014, a woman in her 80s, who sometimes used a cane to walk, stood on a platform hundreds of feet up in the canopy of a Costa Rican forest, getting ready to leap into the sky.
“Nobody thought it was a good idea,” says Darek DeFreece, who was president of the Cal Alumni Association at the time. CAA was leading the trip through its Cal Discoveries Travel program. “I went and talked to her, and she said, ‘Look, I’ve got one more chance to do this in my life, and I want to go.’”
Posted on May 29, 2020 - 9:36am
