Carina Marquez, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, is a big believer in prevention. So she was delighted when, last year, health authorities in the US and Europe approved the first vaccines for respiratory syncytial virus. RSV vaccines hold the potential to reduce the thousands of hospitalizations and deaths associated with the virus in the US each year. But vaccines are only effective if they get in the arms of the people who most need them. “It’s really important to make sure that people have equal access,” Marquez says. “Inequities in access result in inequities in hospitalizations and deaths.”
There are now three vaccines