Professor Jim Al-Khalili

speaker
535 appearances 4 recordings 2 series first heard May 2026 last heard 15 Jun

Professor Jim Al-Khalili’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months
2 · Jun OctJan 26AprJulnow

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

Appearances

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Discovery · The Life Scientific: Seth Berkley · 1 Jun 2026 podcast
It really is crazy because on the one side, we're in a renaissance of science and amazing new tools are becoming available.
We're tackling new diseases.
And that's the exciting part.
The bad part is there's been this incredible politicization of vaccines.
And we saw this during the pandemic where many leaders called on their followers not to get vaccinated.
And we saw death rates shift dramatically.
where people following that advice had higher death rates.
And we also saw intentional disinformation, which spreads literally at the speed of light, given social media.
And the combination of that has made people lose trust in governments, lose trust in vaccines, lose trust in health workers.
And it takes a long time to build trust.
Pretty easy to lose.
If you had to make a case for vaccines in just one sentence, what would you say to the skeptics?
I mean, we have to start off by saying the natural situation of life is for children to die, lots of them.
The mortality rates before public health was 300 out of 1,000.
Today, in the best countries, it's about one and a half.
And for me, vaccines are a way to have a parent never have to go through that horrible thing of losing a child, to know that if you have a child or two children,
that they are likely to grow up, live, and in fact, today have about 40 years of extra life.
That is because of these advances, as well as sanitation, clean water, etc.
Right.
For me, what's really exciting is shifting from traditional infectious disease, which is the problem we just discussed, to now having vaccines that work against cancer and even vaccines that are working now against parasitic diseases.
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