This past summer, Rupali Limaye says she “sort of became the vaccine lady at the pool.”
She’s a behavioral and social scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, so it made sense that other parents were coming to her for information. Limaye has also spent the past decade studying vaccine hesitancy. In that work, she has come to understand deeply that when someone has doubts, hearing the facts from someone the person knows well can be a powerful force in overcoming those doubts.
She knows, too, that not all families have that kind of relationship with a doctor. “We’ve had such an erosion of trust in the health care system and in public health,” she says “that we should really leverage the peer-to-peer approach, right?”
So Limaye and Johns Hopkins have created a free two-hour course on the online platform Coursera that’s open to anyone. It’s called COVID Vaccine Ambassador Training: How to Talk to Parents.
Read more at NPR.