Matt Keeling is a mathematician who specialises in the spread of infectious diseases. He has worked on a number of infections from measles to influenza and from COVID-19 to plague. He has been a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M) since 2008, a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) from 2010 to 2022, and a member of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) from 2023.
Yes the approved vaccines are safe. If you balance the risks, then taking the vaccine is much safer than taking your chances with COVID-19.
Over the past one hundred years, mathematics has been used to understand and predict the spread of diseases, relating important public-health questions to basic infection parameters. Matthew Keeling describes some of the mathematical developments that have improved our understanding and predictive ability.
