Pandemic Center

Jennifer Nuzzo, DrPH

Director of the Pandemic Center, Professor of Epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health
pandemic_center@brown.edu
Research Profile
Twitter

Biography

Jennifer Nuzzo is a nationally and globally recognized leader on global health security, public health preparedness and response, and health systems resilience. Together with colleagues from the Nuclear Threat Initiative and Economist Impact, she co-leads the development of the first-ever Global Health Security Index, which benchmarks 195 countries’ public health and healthcare capacities and capabilities, their commitment to international norms and global health security financing, and socioeconomic, political, and environmental risk environments.

In addition to her scholarly work, Nuzzo regularly advises national governments and for-profit and nonprofit organizations on pandemic preparedness and response, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. She is a pandemic advisor for Impact Assets’ Stop the Spread Campaign. She is currently a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s (NASEM) Standing Committee for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Center for Preparedness and Response.

Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Fox News, Politico, The Hill, and The Boston Globe. She was featured in Debunking Borat, a television series on Amazon Prime Video, and her work was featured on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. She served as COVID Advisor for the Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.

 

Recent News

Scientific American

U.S. Plan to Drop Some Childhood Vaccines to Align with Denmark Will Endanger Children, Experts Say

The U.S. reportedly plans to overhaul the country’s childhood vaccine schedule. The move, first reported by CNN, would change how many vaccines to protect against various diseases children get and when they receive those immunizations.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., secretary of health and human services, is a longtime vaccine skeptic and supports altering the vaccine schedule. Recommendations for several vaccines that are currently given routinely to children in the U.S.—including shots for rotavirus, varicella (chickenpox), hepatitis A, meningococcal bacteria, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)—could be scrapped entirely under the plans, according to CNN.
Read Article
JAMA

A New H3N2 Influenza Strain Is Raising Concerns About This Flu Season

Flu season comes around every year, but a new strain is leading many global health experts to worry that this round may be particularly severe. The strain—a version of the influenza A(H3N2) virus—first appeared in surveillance reports in June, 4 months after the 2025-2026 influenza vaccine formulation had already been determined, and has been associated with earlier waves of influenza outbreaks in Canada, Japan, and the UK.
Read Article
CNN

Flu season in the US is heating up, driven by new subclade K variant

The latest data on respiratory illness in the United States shows that shoppers and merry-makers are spreading more than just holiday cheer: They’re also passing around germs. In many cases, it’s a new virus variant that’s been causing early and busy flu seasons in Asia, Australia and Europe.

The US is on the cusp of finding out what this flu variant, called subclade K, will do. For the week ending December 6 — the first full week after the Thanksgiving holiday — the proportion of doctor’s visits for symptoms including fever plus a cough or sore throat rose to 3.2%, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Read Article
News from SPH

A school transformed

Over the past five years, the Brown University School of Public Health has undergone a profound transformation, evolving into one of the nation’s most impactful public health institutions. During the tenure of Dean Ashish K. Jha, the school navigated unprecedented times in public health and higher education, emerging more inclusive, more interdisciplinary and deeply prepared for the challenges ahead.
Read Article
Nature

The top US health director who stood up for science — and was fired


When Susan Monarez was sworn in to lead the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the country’s premier public-health agency, many researchers across the country breathed a sigh of relief.

Trained as a microbiologist and immunologist, Monarez had been a non-partisan government scientist for nearly 20 years. She was an unexpectedly uncontroversial choice by US President Donald Trump, who had previously put forward (but later withdrew the nomination for) Dave Weldon, a physician and vaccine sceptic who worked as a Republican member of Congress from 1995 to 2009.

---
Read Article
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

A CDC committee led by RFK Jr. allies votes to stop recommending newborns get the hepatitis B vaccine

In the 1980s, researchers tested a new hepatitis B vaccine candidate on over 10,000 people, finding it well tolerated with no reports of serious adverse events. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Engerix-B to prevent potentially deadly hepatitis B infections in 1989. In 1986, it had approved another vaccine Recombivax HB; its label points to studies involving more than 1,000 people. The US government has been recommending these vaccines for all newborns since 1991 and cases of hepatitis B in people 19 years old and younger have dropped 99 percent since it did. Yet despite this efficacy and the numerous safety studies conducted before after the vaccines were licensed, anti-vaccine activists have targeted the long-used immunizations as inadequately researched. The lawyer Aaron Siri, who has worked closely for and with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for years, sought in 2020, for instance, to have the licenses for the vaccines suspended or withdrawn.

---
Read Article

Jennifer Nuzzo in the News

 See all Pandemic Center news
The National News Desk

RFK Jr. overhauls vaccine advisory panel; doctor calls it 'dark day for public health'

(TNND) — Health officials are sounding alarms over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s decision to overhaul a vaccine advisory board with his appointees.

The Health and Human Services secretary announced Monday in a Wall Street Journal opinion article that he was replacing all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

The ACIP is an expert scientific panel that develops vaccine recommendations for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The immunization schedule, or list of recommended shots, for kids is based on the panel’s advice to the CDC.

The ACIP recommendations have consequences for which vaccines insurers are willing to cover and which vaccines doctors recommend to their patients.

---
News from SPH

Are we ready?

Five years after the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic, School of Public Health experts look to Washington as they weigh in on where our biosurveillance tools and preparedness systems stand now: What’s changed, what hasn’t and what must be built to make us ready for the next pandemic?
CFR - Youtube

CFR 4/2 Global Affairs Expert Webinar: Complex Public Health Emergencies

Jennifer Nuzzo, professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University's School of Public Health, leads the conversation on complex public health emergencies.

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.