Joseph Smyser is CEO of The Public Good Projects (PGP), a public health non-profit that designs and implements large-scale social listening programs. PGP has worked with major social media companies, designing methods to surface insights from their data to create programs responding to the opioid epidemic, national mental health crisis, polio outbreaks, pandemic, and other topics. PGP designed Kaiser Permanente’s national system monitoring public conversations on common mental health conditions to identify trending and emerging misinformation associated with stigma, and Blue Shield of California Foundation’s system monitoring aspects of domestic violence. In 2019, PGP created the nation's largest vaccine misinformation monitoring program, Project VCTR, used by over 1,200 organizations. In 2021, with UNICEF, PGP created the Vaccination Demand Observatory, establishing social listening programs across all UNICEF countries.
Previously
COVID-19 vastly accelerated vaccine skepticism, such that even routine childhood immunizations, including shots that had largely eliminated measles, are now being questioned....