Many people are hesitant to trust the newly available COVID-19 vaccines, in large part due to misinformation or a misunderstanding of the science behind them. To help the community - both on campus and beyond - better understand vaccine development and how they work, Wayne State University will host a virtual town hall on Thursday, Jan. 14, from 3 to 4 p.m., streaming at wayne.edu/live.

"The new COVID-19 vaccines are a critical step forward in our ability to defeat the pandemic that has upended so much of our daily lives for the past year," said Wayne State President M. Roy Wilson. "And while the vaccines have been shown to be remarkably effective, life will only return to normal once enough people have been vaccinated to achieve herd immunity - an additional 70% of the adult population, when you take into account those who may already have immunity from having contracted COVID-19."

At the town hall, President Wilson and Interim Provost Laurie Lauzon Clabo will join a panel of health care experts from the Wayne State faculty, including Associate Professor of Pharmacy Practice Paul Kilgore, M.D., M.P.H., and the School of Medicine's Marcus Zervos, M.D., who served as co-principal investigators on the Moderna and Johnson and Johnson vaccine studies in Detroit, and Ramona Benkert, Ph.D., ANP-BC, FAANP, interim dean of the College of Nursing. We will discuss how the vaccines work, the research that went into them, and their distribution, then we will answer questions.

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"After an extremely challenging and divisive year, these vaccines offer an important opportunity for all of us to unite for each other and the greater good," Wilson said.