Biography

Angus Thomson is Senior Social Scientist: Demand for Immunization, Health Section, UNICEF, NY. He is also Adjunct Clinical Professor, Department of Communication Studies & Global Health Communication Center, Indiana University School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI, USA. He is currently spearheading the Vaccination Demand Observatory, a global collaboration aiming to provide countries with a full capacity strengthening package for social listening and engagement, initially focused on vaccine misinformation.


As Lead, Vaccine Confidence and Coverage, Global Public Affairs, Sanofi Pasteur, he previously developed a global program of research, development and implementation into adherence to vaccination and vaccine uptake. Through collaborations with experts in the social, behavioural and communication sciences, his team developed a suite of instruments to understand & measure attitudes to vaccination. He has also developed the AIMS mixed-learning behavior-centered IPC training program for Healthcare Professionals with Prof. John Parrish-Sprowl. He proposed a new framework for vaccination advocacy1 which identified the need for more interdisciplinary collaboration2, more evidence, and engagement in the public conversation. Having developed the 5As taxonomy of determinants3 of vaccination uptake, Angus has run national multi-stakeholder projects in Europe, Africa and Latin America that aim to improve vaccination uptake.


He has published over 20 peer-reviewed opinion pieces, research papers, and book chapters on vaccine confidence and coverage, and co-edited an 18-paper Special Issue on Vaccine Confidence in Vaccine7. Dr. Thomson has appeared on CNN and BBC World to discuss vaccine confidence in the context of COVID-19. He also lectures on Vaccination Perception at the Institute Pasteur, Paris, and the VaxinLive Masters Program in Lyon.

Publications

Recent list of publications.

  1. A. Thomson, M. Watson. Listen, understand, engage. Sci. Transl. Med. 4, 138ed6 (2012)
  2. H. Larson, J. Leask, S. Aggett, N. Sevdalis, A. Thomson. A Multidisciplinary Research Agenda for Understanding Vaccine-Related Decisions. Vaccines 2013, 1, 293-304
  3. Thomson A, Robinson K, Vallée-Tourangeau G. (2015) The 5As: A practical taxonomy for the determinants of vaccination uptake. Vaccine. 34;1018-1024.
  4. Bahk C, Cumming M, Paushter L, Madoff L, Thomson A, Brownstein J. (2015) A real-time online platform to monitor the public conversation on vaccination in mainstream and social media. Health Affairs. 35(2):341-7.
  5. Thomson A, Watson M. (2016) Vaccine hesitancy: a vade mecum v1.0. Vaccine. 34;1989-1992.
  6. Wheelock A, Miraldo M, Thomson A, Vincent C, Sevdalis N. Evaluating the importance of policy amenable factors in explaining influenza vaccination: a cross-sectional multinational study. BMJ Open. 2017 12;7:e014668.
  7. Vaccine Hesitancy: Towards a Better Understanding of Drivers and Barriers to Awareness, Acceptance and Activation (https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/vaccine/vol/36/issue/44)
  8. Kassianos G, Banerjee A, … Thomson A, Vitoux O. Key policy and programmatic factors to improve influenza vaccination rates based on the experience from four high-performing countries. Drugs in Context 2021; 10: 2020-9-5.