Science & Society: Vaccines

Join us for an urgent conversation on vaccines, trust, and the fractures that have made immunization one of the most contested questions in America.

Vaccines have saved more lives than almost any other human invention. They’re so effective that the diseases they prevented all but disappeared from collective memory. Now, childhood immunization rates are falling. Measles, declared eliminated in 2000, is back. Federal agencies are being reshaped by officials who have questioned whether vaccines work at all. And a growing movement of influencers, parents, and politicians is challenging not just individual shots but the very idea that public health is a shared obligation.

So, where did this come from, what is actually going on, and what do we do about it? How did vaccines become one of the defining political fault lines of this moment—and how can trust in public health be repaired?

David Wallace-Wells, columnist and writer at The New York Times and author of The Uninhabitable Earth, hosts a conversation with Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, infectious disease physician and former director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, and Jessica Malaty Rivera, infectious disease epidemiologist and science communicator whose research focuses on trust in public health.

Come early to engage with local community biology lab, Genspace, who will bring hands-on microscope stations, interactive displays, and a community question wall to invite visitors into an open conversation about vaccines and the immune system.

Science & Society: Vaccines responds to Jordan Eagles's concurrent exhibition Bases Loaded, on view in the 3rd floor gallery. The exhibition asks: what is in our blood, and who is allowed to belong—to a team, a family, a nation? In the garden, stargazing with the Amateur Astronomers' Association will open and conclude the night, weather permitting.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher Pioneer Works