Bringing The World Home To You

© 2024 WUNC North Carolina Public Radio
120 Friday Center Dr
Chapel Hill, NC 27517
919.445.9150 | 800.962.9862
91.5 Chapel Hill 88.9 Manteo 90.9 Rocky Mount 91.1 Welcome 91.9 Fayetteville 90.5 Buxton 94.1 Lumberton 99.9 Southern Pines 89.9 Chadbourn
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Bioethicist Cautions Against Too Much Caution In Vaccine Research

Worker at a vaccine manufacturing facility.
Sanofi Pasteur / Patrick Boulen
/
Flickr - Creative Commons
Vaccine manufaturing facility.

When German measles, or rubella, broke out in the U.S. in the 1960s, women were terrified about the disabling effects the disease could have on their unborn babies. Clinicians eventually developed a vaccine but would not administer it to pregnant women, believing it was too risky – a decision that led to thousands of abortions and a huge amount of stress and fear. 

The zika virus, which is similarly mild for most adults but can be devastating for fetuses, could fall prey to the same thinking as medical researchers endeavor to create and test a vaccine. And these efforts raise larger questions about which populations participate in medical testing, and which are excluded.

Host Frank Stasio talks with bioethicist and social medicine professor Anne Lyerly and with history professor Leslie Reagan about the historical example of rubella and the current state of medical research involving pregnant women. 
 

Stay Connected
Jennifer Brookland is the American Homefront Project Veterans Reporting Fellow. She covers stories about the military and veterans as well as issues affecting the people and places of North Carolina.
Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.