Angus Thomson

Senior Director, Vaccination Advocacy

Sanofi Pasteur

Angus Thomson founded and leads the Vaccination Advocacy team at Sanofi Pasteur in Lyon, France. He is the architect of a global program of research, development and implementation into adherence to vaccination and public engagement. Through collaborations with experts in the social, behavioural and communication sciences, the team has developed a suite of instruments to understand & measure attitudes to vaccination, and is now developing and testing behavior change interventions. He proposed a new framework for vaccination advocacy1 which identified the need for more interdisciplinary collaboration2, more evidence, and engagement in the public conversation, and he is now trying to put this into evidence-based practice. Having developed the 5As taxonomy of determinants3 of vaccination uptake, he is currently piloting national multi-stakeholder projects in Europe, Africa and Latin America that aim to improve vaccination uptake. To understand the impact of social and news media on public confidence, he has also led the development of social analytical tools and methodologies including the Vaccine Sentimeter4. He subscribes strongly to the idea that understanding of perceptions and behaviours should lead the development of digital tools, and not the reverse. The tail should not wag the dog. Angus has a PhD in molecular oncology from Queensland University. In Japan and Paris he worked as a science/medical writer covering all aspects of medicine and biomedical science, founded a business, and worked for a large medical advertising agency. For 3 years subsequent he worked in Scientific Affairs at Sanofi Pasteur MSD in Lyon. He is a member of the Vaccines Europe External Affairs working group and chairs the Editorial Board of Vaccines Today, the EU portal for engaging information and discussion on vaccination. He has published 14 peer-reviewed opinion pieces, research papers, and book chapter’s on vaccination acceptance, and is also a regular reviewer for peer-reviewed journals such as the BMJ, Science Translational Medicine and Vaccine. He also lectures on Vaccination Perception at the Institute Pasteur, and is often invited to speak on the subjects of vaccine acceptance and social media. angus.thomson@sanofipasteur.com 1. A. Thomson, M. Watson. Listen, understand, engage. Sci. Transl. Med. 4, 138ed6 (2012) 2. H. Larson, J. Leask, S. Aggett, N. Sevdalis, A. Thomson. A Multidisciplinary Research Agenda for Understanding Vaccine-Related Decisions. Vaccines 2013, 1, 293-304 3. Thomson A, Robinson K, Vallée-Tourangeau G. (2015) The 5As: A practical taxonomy for the determinants of vaccination uptake. Vaccine. 34;1018-1024. 4. Bahk C, Cumming M, Paushter L, Madoff L, Thomson A, Brownstein J. (2015) A real-time online platform to monitor the public conversation on vaccination in mainstream and social media. Health Affairs. 35(2):341-7. 5. Thomson A, Watson M. (2016) Vaccine hesitancy: a vade mecum v1.0. Vaccine. 34;1989-1992.