Opinion: The NIH canceled my research on vaccine hesitancy

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the demand for vaccines briefly exceeded supply. Across the U.S., state governments decided who should receive priority access to livesaving vaccines. Several vulnerable groups, like people with cancer and the elderly, were consistently and appropriately prioritized. But others, like people with severe mental illness, were not, despite data showing that they were almost three times more likely to die from Covid-19.

As a small step toward redressing this wrong, I asked the National Institutes of Health to prioritize people with severe mental illness by funding research designed to reveal why they are especially likely to be vaccine hesitant (i.e., to reject or delay vaccination despite availability). I hoped that the knowledge gained through this work could be used to encourage people with severe mental illness to get vaccinated, enabling them to protect themselves from preventable morbidity and mortality, even if society continued to not appropriately value them during future infectious disease outbreaks.

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