DAVID M. HIGGINS, a pediatrician at the University of Colorado and Children’s Hospital Colorado, sees patients and also conducts research — but “not the type of research that’s done in the laboratory with beakers and things like that,” as he puts it. Rather, his focus is on health services research, including the study of vaccine delivery, public access to vaccines, and vaccine hesitancy.
He’s particularly concerned about misconceptions regarding vaccine hesitancy, especially among parents — which he says is not as widespread as many believe. As he wrote recently in an essay in The New England Journal of Medicine, co-authored with Sean T. O’Leary: “We believe vaccine hesitancy shouldn’t be normalized when it is not the norm.”