Dr. Katherine O’Brien envisions a world where no child will die from a vaccine-preventable disease.
“Every one of us is alive today because of vaccines,” said O’Brien, who was recently awarded the Canada 150 Research Chair inVaccinology and Global Health at Dalhousie University.
“There are diseases like smallpox that have been eradicated so no children get vaccinated against smallpox anymore because it doesn’t exist anymore. We all have survived and thrived because of the power of vaccines.”
As a world-renowned pediatric infectious disease expert and vaccinologist, O’Brien has worked to help governments in developing countries put as much vaccine into children’s arms as possible.
“Vaccines are such a powerful tool and for me there is a compelling moral imperative that those vaccines are used where they’re most needed,” she said in an interview Thursday from Ottawa, where the federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
announced the latest Canada 150 positions.
“And so my focus has been on bringing life-saving vaccines to the families and communities where children still die of vaccine preventable diseases.”
Seven of the 24 one-time Canada 150 grants announced Thursday were worth $7 million, including O’Brien’s chair at Dalhousie.
Currently a professor of international health and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, O’Brien will begin her tenure at Dalhousie on Dec. 1.
“I wasn’t actually looking to leave (Johns Hopkins) but this opportunity came along and when a fantastic opportunity like this comes, a one-time opportunity, it’s very hard to say no,” said O’Brien, who was educated in Ontario and Quebec but whose family has deep roots in Halifax and the Annapolis Valley.
“I’m Canadian. I’ve been away for 30 years and we’re very open to coming back and being able to make my contributions back in Canada.”
She will continue her international work in collaboration with her new colleagues at the Canadian Centre for Vaccinology at Dalhousie, as well as the researchers at Johns Hopkins and other institutions she’s worked with for decades.
“All of global health work is all about collaboration so I really see this as an expansion as opposed to leaving something that I’ve been doing,” she said.
O’Brien has worked in countries across sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia, including Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, India and Nepal. She has helped develop new vaccines but her most recent work is researching the effectiveness of existing vaccines.
“I do a lot of work of taking that evidence and translating it to the decision-making that governments usually have to do about which vaccines are going to be supported by the government,” she said.
In the past, the cost of vaccines has been thebiggest obstacle for low-income countries but that’s been largely solved through the work of organizations such as the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, she said.
The problem now is getting those vaccines into the arms of children, who still die in the millions every year from diseases such as pneumonia, which kills more children more than any other illness.
“Only vaccines that are put into the arms of children save lives,” O’Brien said, “so delivering the vaccines . . . on time to every child, that’s a complex systemrelated problem that many countries in low-income settings struggle with.”
