The Campfire: Recent Episodes
Claremont Graduate University
Welcome to The Campfire. This is the idea place where thinkers and leaders from Claremont Graduate University talk about their intellectual, creative, and personal journeys.
Tony Villani is many things: chief among them, a visionary chronicler of non-fiction stories.
He recently joined the podcast to discuss some of his work, his creative process, and why he chooses the medium of independent filmmaking to display his artistic vision.
Villani also goes into detail on his latest project, Soldiers: Six Stories, Six Wars, including how it was made and why he chose to present the film in its final format. (Bonus content: stick around for a sneak preview on his upcoming projects still in the works.)
A cut of Soldiers is available for streaming on Tubi.
If you were to ask Torie Weiston-Serdan about how it feels to be featured in Forbes, she would probably answer with one word: “humbled.”
Torie recently joined Jeremy on The Campfire to discuss her passion for critical mentoring and what it means to make a positive impact in the lives of youth. Plus, they go over the ways to be community-engaged, and what that looks like in CGU’s MA program that Weiston-Serdan directs.
To learn more about Torie’s work in critical mentoring, visit criticalmentoring.org. Learn more about her nonprofit, the Youth Mentoring Action Network, at yman.org.
Before he was a university president, dean, or even a college professor, Len Jessup was a centerfielder for the College of the Siskiyous in Northern California with a drive to learn.
Today, he’s one of the most widely-recognized leaders in higher education, and has served as CGU’s 12th president since 2018.
On today’s episode, Jessup sits down with Megan and Jeremy to discuss how he approaches leadership, and reflects on the experiences and mentors that helped him on the journey to where he is today.
If you have your own stories to share, send us an email at thecampfirepodcast@cgu.edu.
Can’t Have a Campfire without a flame. Did you know that The Flame magazine at CGU has been in publication since 2000? 22 years later, it’s still going strong!
Join Jeremy and Megan as they discuss the magazine, its history, and some of the notable taglines throughout the years.
Plus, they go over the newly launched digital edition of The Flame and talk about the remarkable design work of CGU’s very own Director of Design Services Gina Pirtle.
Go to flame.cgu.edu to read the newest issue.
If you have your own stories to share, send us an email at thecampfirepodcast@cgu.edu
Welcome back and thanks for listening!
Last season, we spoke with Diane Chase, CGU’s VP for academic innovation, student success, and strategic initiatives. Not only is she well-versed in student success but is a widely-renowned archaeologist.
Her work was recently featured in PBS’s NOVA documentary program, one of the most popular primetime science series on American television. “Ancient Maya Metropolis” features Diane Chase and her husband Arlen, who for over 25 years have directed archaeological excavations at Caracol, Southern Belize. Their work has been vital to uncovering just how vast the city of Caracol was, and its significance to the Mayan people.
Tune in as Meg and Jeremy discuss the documentary, the breakthroughs thanks to modern technology, and the significance of preserving culture.
Chase is one of many examples of the incredible researchers we have at CGU—learn more about her here! Sources Mentioned:
Caracol Excavations website, where you can learn more about the Chases’ excavations in Caracol.
Ancient Maya Metropolis (episode available with qualifying charitable donation and subscription to PBS)
Inside Higher Ed feature on Arlen and Diane Chase, “The Road to Caracol”
Happy 2022! With the new year, we are excited to announce something new about the podcast: a co-host! Join Jeremy Byrum and new co-host Megan Castro, CGU’s assistant director of digital content & engagement, around The Campfire. In this new season, Jeremy and Megan will be teaming up to discuss “Campfire Bites,” smaller, themed conversation about what’s going on around campus, in the community, and in the world of higher education. For their first episode, Megan and Jeremy introduce themselves and talk about the future of higher ed, as well as the implications of technology on modes of instruction. How can traditional institutions adapt to the shift to online and hybrid instruction in the wake of the pandemic? And, where does CGU fit in? So, grab your marshmallows, chocolates, and maybe some headphones, and help us keep this fire burning. Plus, we’ll still be bringing thinkers and leaders from CGU to talk about their work, just like before!
For years, CGU Associate Professor of Economic Sciences Greg DeAngelo has been studying and interpreting data from coast-to-coast. Now, he and CGU’s Computational Justice Lab work closely with agencies in the public sector to address pressing questions of the criminal justice system. We sat down with Professor DeAngelo to discuss the finer details of the Lab’s work, along with its focus on finding causal effects of various justice issues and policies.
For more information about CGU's Computational Justice Lab, visit their website.
TRANSCRIPT
Jeremy Byrum:
Hi, everybody. And thank you for joining us from wherever you may be. It's getting a little chilly out there, so welcome to the campfire. I'm your host, Jeremy Byrum. And today, I'm excited to be joined by our guest, CGU Associate Professor of Economic Sciences and Director of the Computational Justice Lab, Gregory DeAngelo. Dr. DeAngelo works closely with public sector agencies to address pressing questions of criminal justice policy, identifying the causal effects of actions by both legal and extra-legal actors on public safety. Along with the Computational Justice Lab Research, they generate technologies with the potential to counteract any negative externalities of the actors we mentioned. Greg, thank you so much for joining the show.
Gregory DeAngelo:
Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Jeremy Byrum:
Awesome. I'm excited to talk to you. So I want to get into a little bit of your background before we talk about the crux of our discussion here with the lab and what you and the students do in the lab, but how did you, yourself, get into the criminal justice space, in the research space? And then also, how did that bridge into the data analytics space in how that led to you creating the Computational Justice Lab?
Gregory DeAngelo:
Sure, yeah. Happy to explain some of that. As the story go, it's not a terribly interesting story, but ...
Jeremy Byrum:
Well, stories are.
Gregory DeAngelo:
... I went off to school, to college. Really, my parents didn't go to college, nobody really. I was a little weird in my family in a sense. I was early into math and sciency stuff. And my siblings are more on the artsy ... I mean, as it turns out, we've all dabble in the teaching space a little bit. But I was the weird one. And I went off to college and I was interested in technical math type problems. And I was hanging around a bunch of engineers. And they're great people. And I had a lot of fun hanging out with them. But I just was super pulled toward social problems.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And I wanted to find how I could work on social problems. And in particular, at that stage in my life, I was interested in the environmental issues. And I had some great faculty members who had influenced me quite a bit and said, you really ought to think about a PhD. And I remember talking over my parents and they were like, you're getting your degree. You don't need to go get another. I was like, yeah, I think I'm going to do it. Not only am I going to get a degree, I'm going to leave upstate New York where I lived my whole life and move to California.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And that, I think, got a couple of furrowed eyebrows and like, what the heck are you up to here? But anyway, so I got to grad school thinking I was going to do environmental economics. And I was intrigued by environmental economics, but I don't know. It just wasn't the thing that I thought I was going to really dive in on. And I forget which trip home it was. I wish I remembered for a life of me now, but I'd flown back to the East Coast to see my family. And I was on a flight from the East Coast back home, and I sat next to a guy who worked for the Oregon State Police.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And it's a five-and-a-half hour flight. And I remember the guy, he probably wanted to get some shuteye, but he ends up next to me, something like 23-year-old, wet behind the ears, super well caffeinated puppy dog who just wants attention. And so, I'm sitting next to this guy and he starts talking about all these issues going on in Oregon with regards to the policing. And so, that led me to dig in and start asking questions about what the heck's going on there. And long story short, the guy hands me some data. Well, he didn't, another person.
Gregory DeAngelo:
He handed me some data, and that got the ball rolling, me thinking about criminal justice issues. And that's like 16 years or something ago now. And so, I really started becoming intrigued by the criminal justice system and how complicated it is. And the layers, there's so many layers there. And the minute that I finish a paper and I think to myself like, okay, I'm done on that part of the criminal justice system. I'm not going to think about it anymore.
Gregory DeAngelo:
I feel like two or three years later, I end up picking up that data, or going back to that problem and reassessing it, thinking about it through a new lens. And it's made for a career now. And so, I was really into this stuff. I really enjoyed working on empirical issues related to the criminal justice system. I was having a lot of fun with it, but I was also recognizing that a lot of the agencies I worked with had issue. They had real issues that they couldn't sort out internally. Sometimes it was evaluating their practices and policies.
Gregory DeAngelo:
Other times, it was more tangible things like we know there's bad guys out there. We don't know how to catch them because a lot of the marketplace that used to be on the street have moved online and we're not as savvy in that space and we need help. And so, and I could talk about that more, so anyway. There's all these ways. I just found that I was interacting with numerous criminal justice agencies and I was enjoying it. Not to sound insensitive toward my colleagues, but it wasn't just writing academic papers anymore. Everything was coming to life.
Gregory DeAngelo:
I was talking to the people who were creating the data that I was using, and I was just loving every bit of it. But I recognized at that point in time that you got to get pretty serious about your toolkit as a researcher, and so dug in pretty deeply on the data science and computer science toolkit that's needed to work with a lot of these agencies and perform the kinds of analysis that we conduct. And I was really enjoying it. And then fast forward a few years from there, I'd been working on this stuff and I had PhD students around me that were really interested and undergrads that are really interested in this work.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And I started saying, there's more agencies and more data and more problems out there than I, individually, or even me with just a couple of PhD students could ever take on. It'd be interesting to scale this and give PhD students the opportunity to gain some of the education that I had obtained from interacting with real people. So much of what we do in the academy is like a good distance away from reality. Not to sound insensitive or inconsiderate toward my colleagues. But a lot of times, we study people, but we don't ever talk to the people that we study.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And I was getting away from that. I was out there in the field. I was talking to these people and learning about every ... Like if there was a line in the Excel spreadsheet that looked weird to me, I was finding, I could call the person up who probably created that line in the spreadsheet and talk to them about it. And that level of interaction was a wholly different type of education that you can't teach in the classroom. And so, I was thinking, how do we expand this and get more students this kind of an opportunity?
Gregory DeAngelo:
And that's where the notion of the lab, this Computational Justice Lab came from. And I've been fortunate to get ... I should say we, because there's a whole group of faculty now, have been fortunate to get support for the lab that's enabled us to really impact the lives of now we're looking upwards of almost 30 PhD students ...
Jeremy Byrum:
Wow
Gregory DeAngelo:
... that have been, meaning they're now alumni of the lab, or are currently involved in the lab and get crazy access to cool data, need opportunities to go hang out with different law enforcement or prosecutors' officers, different types of criminal justice agencies, and are really making an impact on the community, which is perhaps the most important part of all of this.
Jeremy Byrum:
Definitely. Now I mentioned it a little bit in the intro about what the lab does, but can you elaborate a little bit on ... Again, we talked a little bit about your mathematical and data science background, but can you go into a little more detail of exactly what the lab does, maybe not naming agencies, but the types of agencies you guys work with and what your goal is as a research institution, research entity.
Gregory DeAngelo:
Yeah, absolutely. Sure. And so, the quick part that we can answer that, which is we do the same things that happen at any other academic institution. Our students take classes, we get them trained up on whatever social ... It's typically social science degrees that they're getting. So we're going to get them the formal training in the classroom. That's going to happen for sure. The second part, and that's maybe a little bit different than a lot of other social science degrees, is our students are going to take classes.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And then we have lots of small, little informal training sessions in lots of different computer programming languages. And so, this is where the more technologically advanced listeners are going to ... They're going to be trained in the ARS Data, Python, SQL, GIS, all these different programs. The idea is we're not going to just expect them to learn that as they go. We actually train them on these things while they're getting their training on social sciences. So now they're really well equipped. They're like a data scientist, is the new buzzword.
Gregory DeAngelo:
The big difference for a lot of our students is that they're trained in data science, but they're also trained in this thing called causal inference, which is not the age old adage that correlation doesn't apply causation. Our students are going to dive in deep on that causal side, finding that A causes B, just a much higher standard, research standard to put in front of them. So there's that part of it. And then I'd say the third part is, and I'll elaborate a little bit more on this part, is that we work with lots of different agencies and law enforcement agencies, prosecutors agencies.
Gregory DeAngelo:
We work with different social services. So we work with a lot of these different agencies and the needs of these agencies are varied. Sometimes it's something like we've introduced a new policy and we don't know if it's a good one or a bad one. Can you evaluate it for us and tell us ...
Jeremy Byrum:
We, as in the state of California or as in ...
Gregory DeAngelo:
Yeah, it could be something that's statewide. It could be something that's countywide. Or just a local police department, for example. Lots of policies are getting enacted at every level, local, all the way to federal level or international level, like their policies are getting enacted all over the place. And one of the things that's just doesn't exist, and I would guess more than 99% of all agencies, whether you name the government entity, and it probably doesn't exist is a team that evaluates if what they're doing is good, if what they're doing is achieving what they've set out to achieve.
Gregory DeAngelo:
Most agencies don't have an evaluation group. And so, that's where we come in. And we'll work with the different agencies and say, hey, you've enacted these policies or you're trying out these new strategies maybe to ... If it's a police department, maybe you're trying out a different patrolling strategy to try to enhance community safety. Are you? Are you making the community safer? Is that new policy, is that new practice that you're implementing actually improving the community's wellbeing or not?
Gregory DeAngelo:
And the reason is that you'd want to know that, of course, is if it's expensive to implement new policies or if it's costing you more than the old policy was. Hopefully, you're getting something for that in the form of improved safety. So these are the sorts of things that we dive in and the faculty will leverage our relationships with different agencies. And through those relationships, we'll bring students in. And it's great for them because they're now learning, not just how to perform research, but how to take the knowledge and the skills that they've learned and communicate that to non-technical experts.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And explain to the practitioner, explain to the people who are running these agencies, this is what we're going to do, this is why we're going to do it that way. And just there's all of these important forms of communication that you learn when you're trying to bridge the gap between being a researcher and who sits in a silo, versus being a researcher who's out trying to work with these practitioners to evaluate different parts of their agency. Or in other instances, trying to actually develop tools for them that help them do better in their jobs.
Gregory DeAngelo:
So that's a whole part that ... There's no way to teach that in the classroom. You got to get people sitting in front of and talking to these practitioners. And so that's, I think, one of the best parts of what we've got going on, is I'd say half of our lab is engaged in these types of interactions at any point in time.
Jeremy Byrum:
Right. Now, clearly, I mean, as you've said, the lab has been very successful. You've had over, I think you said, 30 student to either are currently in there or have already graduated from CGU. And you mentioned earlier as well that groups that have this, or like you said, 99% of these agencies don't have an evaluation group to come in and do what you guys do. So besides that, besides you guys filling that gap, what is it that the lab brings to the table that an internal audit or someone else looking at the discrepancies in the criminal justice system, what is it that you and the students in the lab bring other than just the data expertise. Are there other advantages? Is it taking bias out of the equation? What is it that you guys bring to those agencies?
Gregory DeAngelo:
Yeah. So I think there's two answers to this question. Let's imagine that everyone had the same sort of computer based skillset, that technical skillset. The training that we offer, I'm going to come back to this, the causal training, that's really important. The extremely important part of the equation is that when we sit down, we're not just some person who knows a little bit of statistics and can mess around on a computer. We're adopting a framework and we're going to learn every single piece of nuance about this agency, as we call, institutional details.
Gregory DeAngelo:
Learn all the important institutional details about this agency to ensure that we can get at the causal relationship in whatever policy or practice that we're going to be evaluating. So that's the first thing, and I can come back to that later perhaps. The second thing, which I think is equally important, but I think is more to the point is we're external, we're unbiased. For us, we're not going to just produce the result that the agency wants.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And in many instances, I just want to be clear about this, the agencies don't want us to just produce a ... If there are problems within their agency, to me it's been the most surprising part of my interactions with these agencies, is that they'll say, we don't know if there are problems. We don't know where they exist. That's why you're here. That's why we're working with you, is we want you to tell us what we're doing wrong or where the problems exist in our agency. And then we want to work with you to try to come up with ways to fix those problems.
Gregory DeAngelo:
So I think that third party, external, unbiased component of who we are really is attractive to the agencies because it's not someone internal that in a lot of ways, we don't know all the office dynamics, we don't know the political details of who's trying to get a promotion, and all that stuff. We're blind to that. We're just there to sit down and say, okay, we're going to look at this policy and evaluate it. And we ask a million questions. And I think a lot of times, agencies are like, the heck are these ... Why are they asking all these weird questions?
Gregory DeAngelo:
But through that process, I think they learn, oh, wow, these folks are really digging in to learn every last detail they need to know to be able to say that this policy is causing this outcome, versus this policy is correlated with this outcome. So I think those two reasons, we, as outsiders, are often welcomed into the fold.
Jeremy Byrum:
Right. Now getting into the causality. Now you've mentioned this word several times. Could you go into a little bit more detail on maybe an example of where one might correlate to things, I don't know, such as crime statistics in certain neighborhoods and how many police are called to those neighborhoods, versus are those correlated or are those causal? What kind of examples in the training does that show? Or what shows up in the training in how you discern between the two? Because that sounds really interesting.
Gregory DeAngelo:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and to me, I think it's really interesting. And to me, it's the crux of a lot of what we're seeing in terms of the social movements that are out there right now with regards to the criminal justice system. One of the most difficult problems, and I don't know what the listenership is like, so I'm going to try to keep this at a level that is suitable for everyone. But one of the things that's tricky is, and hopefully unsurprising, is that things don't happen just at random in the world.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And police aren't just randomly allocated and prosecution isn't just ... Prosecutors aren't just randomly deciding to press charges against people. There's a lot of decisions that are made. Police agencies are making decisions about where to go patrol. And in a lot of ways, that's reactionary like, well, where is crime happening? Alright. Well, there's going to be more police in those areas. If there's going to be more police in those area, there's likely going to be more arrests in those areas.
Gregory DeAngelo:
If there's more arrests in those areas, there's going to be more prosecution, there's going to be more charges pressed. Those people are more likely to go to jail or to prison. And so, this is the trickiness, is these decisions that are made are nonrandom. If it's the case, that crime rates are higher in one part of the community than in another part community and more police are placed in those parts of the community, then there's going to be more arrests made in those parts of the community.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And if there's more arrests made in those parts of the community, there's going to be more prosecution. Now, what happens is this is an issue of what we're ... Actually, let me say this differently. What we're observing could be that there's actually higher crime in those areas. And that's why there's more police in those areas. It could be that there's some other force, there's some other reason that we're putting more police in those areas.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And we don't observe that as a researcher, but the end result might be that it looks like the police are disproportionately policing in certain communities than they are in other communities. And if you fast forward in the process a little bit further and you were to hone in on prosecutors, for example, you might say, well, then it looks like the prosecutors are being maybe biased toward one group because they're prosecuting more crimes in one part of the community than in another part of the community. And therefore you might start to use words like bias.
Gregory DeAngelo:
You might say, well, it appears that prosecutors are more biased, right? And so, it looks like the prosecutors maybe are going after like one subset or one ethnic group in the community more than another. But that's a problem if you were to just sit and try to run research project, because prosecutors are downstream quite a bit. A lot of decisions are made before an arrest is made and then suggested charges are made. And then those charges end up at the prosecutor's office.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And the prosecutors make decision based on the evidence put front of them, whether or not they decide to proceed forward with the charges. Well, if there's already bias in the system by people who are involved in this arrest upstream of the prosecutors, then you would be falsely attributing the prosecutor of being biased. When, in fact, that's not their fault. They inherited. Maybe they inherited that bias, and you can go further back. Okay, the police. Maybe the police ... You maybe would say, well, the police are biased. And they could be, I don't know.
Gregory DeAngelo:
But it could be that the police got a bunch of information from a dispatcher, and that dispatcher got a bunch of information from a call taker, a 911 call taker. And that call taker, maybe they were biased. And maybe when they were on the call, when they received the call, they asked a whole bunch of inappropriate questions and then conveyed a whole bunch of information to the dispatcher who then sent the information to the police officer that was somewhat racially motivated.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And that primed that police officer to show up to the call with a heightened level of concern and maybe go a step further than they would have otherwise and make an arrest against that individual. So, I say all this. If it sounds complicated, my response is by design. It's that there's these layers of complexity, there's these layers of decisions that are going on in the criminal justice system. And it makes it so that we can't just conduct really simple basic analyses on the system because there's so much bias born into the system.
Gregory DeAngelo:
So what we end up having to do is go out and search for randomness in this very nonrandom world. And so, for example, one of the things that we're getting closer with on some research is, well, when cases show up at the DA's office, it turns out there's one person who ... Or not one person, a group of people who are the very first people that touch those cases. And so, what the clerical staff does is that they'll get a whole bunch of envelopes basically in from different law enforcement agencies who have made arrests, got all the evidence together, sent that evidence over to the district attorney's office in a packet, and have said, we think that you should file these charges for this particular incident.
Gregory DeAngelo:
As it turns out, those envelopes get handed out to these prosecutors that are called review prosecutors. They get handed out a lot like you'd expect to see a Las Vegas card dealer handing out cards for poker. They literally get shuffled. Like you get one, I get one, the next person. And they just ... One for you, one for you, one for you, one for you. And they just randomized this process. Well, that's the kind of thing we're searching for to say, okay, whether Jeremy got that case or Greg got that case or Alice got that case or Mark got that case or Anita got that case was as good as ran random.
Gregory DeAngelo:
Now, let's ask how did those cases that are as good as randomly distributed, how do the prosecutors proceed from that point forward? Now we're at a place where we can start to ask if bias is being introduced into the system by a prosecutor, because it was as good as random that I got the case versus you getting the case. There was nothing systematic. There was no strategy involved. We didn't know what was inside that envelope. They just doled these things out to us.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And based on that allocation decision, we can say, okay, now let's see if Greg is behaving differently than Jeremy. And if so, what impact is that having on justice, basically, on the way that justice is doled out to the community. Is it being handed out asymmetrically? Or does it appear that agencies are handling things in a consistent and what we would probably deem reasonable way?
Jeremy Byrum:
And that sounds to me too like there's an element of just sheer volume sifting through cases prosecutors get, and I'm assuming some of the work you've done, I mean, in quantitative data shows some of that volume perhaps.
Gregory DeAngelo:
Yeah. So one thing I would say, so let's take California, for example. We can go through this history a bit further back if we want. But more recently, there's an act that passed called the Racial Justice Act. And it basically said that if a minority member of the community received a sentence or was treated differently than a non-minority member ... I mean, I'm really, by the way, given the cliffs notes version of this, there's more nuance. It's a policy that has a lot more nuance.
Gregory DeAngelo:
But basically, if there are differences in the way that people are being treated based on their ethnicity, then we want to write that wrong. That's effectively what the act is trying to get at. And I'm working with some agencies in California that are dealing with this, prosecutors agencies who are dealing with, are we doing things wrong? I mean, that's the question they start with. Well, are we engaging with the community in a way that we're being systematically inappropriate toward one racial group? If so, we want to fix that.
Gregory DeAngelo:
But when I start the conversation, they're not saying that's definitely not happening here. That's not at all the way the conversations start, which may surprise a lot of folks. It usually starts with, Jeremy, back to your main point, like we have so many cases coming in the door that we don't have time to look at like, oh, what's this person's race? And, okay, based on the race, I think I'm going to charge differently on this case than on some other. The volume is crazy. I mean, they will actually, at times, get so backlogged in terms of filing cases that they have ... I've heard this from a few different agencies, they have something that's colloquially called a filing party where they will ...
Jeremy Byrum:
Wow.
Gregory DeAngelo:
... literally pull attorneys who are supposed to be doing other things in the office, they'll pull them in and say, look, the stack of cases that we're back here are so backlogged, we need to pull people in to help us out in terms of getting through our backlog. And so, that's the place where a lot of times the conversation starts, is I don't even know how we could be biased because we're so backlogged, that we don't have time to look at those details. We just flip right to the facts of the case. And then we read that over and then we make a decision based on that.
Gregory DeAngelo:
So that's the first thing I'd say. And then also, pushing along the Racial Justice Act, and I think that probably for some of your listeners, this is an area that is a hot button issue at the moment. So it probably speaks to some of what people are curious about in the criminal justice system. I would say that my own experience, and this is work that the lab is continuing to work on at the moment. And some other work that's been produced out of a different lab, that if you want to share that with your reader, I don't know if you can put that in the notes.
Gregory DeAngelo:
But one of the things that we've seen is that removing the race from the incoming information, meaning the case that's being brought forth to the prosecutor's office, like removing race altogether so that you get to this so-called blind justice or these blind charging decisions doesn't seem to change charging practices whatsoever. And I've found that in my own work and other people are finding that in their work as well. And I think, getting back to your point, this has everything to do with just the volume of cases coming through the door to be biased.
Gregory DeAngelo:
Even if it's implicitly biased, that could play out in the data. And we're still sorting that out. But to be explicitly biased, I think, would be ... You'd get behind compared to your counterparts if you were to engage in that behavior, because the volume is just so overwhelming for these individuals. That's been my experience. That's what's falling out of the agent out of the work that we're doing with various agencies thus far. There's a lots of different ways to get at these things.
Gregory DeAngelo:
Some of the results we continue to find, which I would say has been one of the bigger surprises of my research career because I fully anticipated that I'd be having conversations like, yes, your charging practices don't look so good and we need to make some adjustments. And in fact, we're not finding so much of that evidence.
Jeremy Byrum:
Right. Now, when it comes to using this data, as you've mentioned, some of these agencies either don't know if they're doing something wrong or they claim that they don't and you go in to actually see if there is something that they're either doing incorrectly or doing something due to bias or something like that. When you publish a research study, when you publish a research paper from the lab, what is, I guess, the goal of that? Are you just setting out to just publish the data and have people interpret it as they see it?
Jeremy Byrum:
Or are you trying to have other agencies use that data so they too can see what are the issues amongst either their own practices or the criminal justice system as a whole? Of course, that's not something you can "fix" overnight. Rome wasn't built in one day. The criminal justice system isn't something that, unfortunately, can't be fixed in one day. It can't be made perfect. But what is the goal? I guess, when you publish a research paper, when you go into work with the agency, how do you use that data to, I guess, improve other areas or other agencies?
Gregory DeAngelo:
Yeah. Great question. I want to back up one step and say, these agencies aren't perfect. And if I've coming across that way, that would be wrong on my part. There are issues. And when we raise these issues, the question then becomes, well, how do we fix them? What are potential ways we could fix them? That sometimes becomes an internal conversation for them or an HR problem or something along those lines. And that's fine. They can sort that part out.
Gregory DeAngelo:
But I think the first thing that's important as far as why we engage with these agencies is that when we approach them, the whole idea is to enhance community safety. And my fear is that a lot of these agencies are operating somewhat blindly in terms of understanding. If we introduce this policy, if we change this policy, or we change this practice within our office, a lot of times, they don't know if, well, is the current practice that we're engaged in a good one, meaning it's not introducing bias. It actually seems to be pretty good at enhancing the safety of the community.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And are we getting ready to change our policies or practices toward a less desirable outcome? And they don't know the answer to that question because they're operating in the dark. Because again, as we talked about earlier, they don't have an evaluation group within their agency. That's the first thing. That when we approach them, it's about community safety. It's how do we make communities better by helping these criminal justice agencies patrol, if their police patrol in a smarter way, make more consistent decisions within the prosecutor's office.
Gregory DeAngelo:
If it's the jail and they have to let some people go, let some people go early, who are the best people to let go early, who tend not to go out and commit more crime, and for that matter, more violent crime? These are the decisions that a lot of these agencies are saying, "We've just been working off intuition or gut instinct or experience." That's another one I get a lot. Well, based on our experience, I'm like, "Well, have you ever evaluated your data?" And the answer is like, "Well, no. We don't even know how to do that kind of thing." That's the first thing.
Gregory DeAngelo:
That's the reason we even start the research. In many ways, the publication is just all these efforts coming to a head and saying like, here's what we did and here's what we learned. The hope though of the publications, besides letting the world know that we've engaged in this work and hopefully other people have read it and they think it's good work and that they think that it's helping us to understand the criminal justice system and the way that it interacts with our communities.
Gregory DeAngelo:
Beyond that though, there is another part to it, which is advertising to other criminal justice agencies that are out there that maybe aren't engaged with the research community yet about the value of having these practitioner research partnerships. And so, that's, I think, for me, one of the main things I'm trying to get out there, is we in the research community, there are some folks that I think have a very clear agenda and they maybe just want to produce a result because that's what feels right to them.
Gregory DeAngelo:
But there's many, many, many really good researchers out there that are saying, we don't know the answers to these questions, and we'd like to work with you to help you learn the answers to these questions. And so that we can start to understand, does what we've learned working with an agency that's in a very urban area apply for more rural areas? Or do we need to go engage in research in those rural areas and find out whether or not the answers differ?
Gregory DeAngelo:
And so, to me, we're all contributing to this broader knowledge base that we're slowly building up about the impact that the criminal justice system is having on the community. And I think if we do that in a really fair and honest way, it's good for everyone. It's good for the agencies. It's good for the community. And this is where I think one of the few areas where I think the academic community could be a really trusted entity to act on behalf of the community and the communities that are feeling like they've been targeted and impacted.
Gregory DeAngelo:
In many ways, we are acting on their behalf to go into these criminal justice agencies and say, hey, look, is there bias? Are there issues here? If so, let's identify them. And let's all work together to come up with solutions so that everybody ... Because again, even the criminal justice agencies ... I shouldn't say even, I should say also, the criminal justice agencies are worried about negatively impacting any one community in a bigger way than any other community. That's overwhelmingly been my experience. And it's not just lip service.
Gregory DeAngelo:
They hand the data over that could show them, that could very well show that they're engaged in practices that are biased. And I think they're doing that because they're worried that that could be the case. And if it is, they want to improve on it. But what they don't want this to be, as best I can tell, is a foregone conclusion that they're screwing up, they're doing bad. And so, therefore change absolutely must happen right away. I think they want to be intelligent about how they introduce change so that don't try to fix something that's not broken.
Jeremy Byrum:
Right. And going back to, I guess, ensuring community safety, and perhaps you've already answered this question in one way or another. But why is that research integrity aspect? Like you said, even when you're looking at just quantitative data, of course, you can find data or you can try to find data or create data that supports your argument or supports what you want to do. But when you're trying to remove that, when you're trying to remove that bias, when you're trying to remove that non ... Or I guess not being as genuine as you could be, why does that research integrity become so important as an academic?
Gregory DeAngelo:
Well, the academic community is big, number one. And so, if you're ... Well, let me start even before what I was going to say. The first thing I would say is the academic community, they're pretty good sniffing out if you've done something wrong. And so, this is the peer review process. It's brutal. It can be absolutely brutal. If you haven't, going back to the example I used before, found a situation where it was as good as random, like a coin flip chance, that Jeremy handled this case and Greg didn't.
Gregory DeAngelo:
Or that Greg handled the next case and Jeremy ... You need that randomness to basically say, okay, it was just an act from somewhere else. Lightning struck and you got the case and I didn't. And because you got the case and perhaps you're a little more lenient of a prosecutor than I am, maybe you didn't press as many charges or you didn't press charges at all. You decided not to proceed forward, whereas I would have. And then we can ask a question about, what's the effect of being more stringent or less stringent on the outcome of the case?
Gregory DeAngelo:
Or maybe you're less inclined to proceed forward on charges against the minority community than I am. And then we can ask, well, what's the effect of being disproportionately tougher on the minority community or pressing more charges against the minority community on their outcomes? We can start to get at these sorts of things, but it's that randomness that we require. And we, as an academic community, require to be able to say that anything is even close to causal. And if we don't have that, then their results simply aren't believable.
Gregory DeAngelo:
The academic community will not publish them. Or maybe they would publish them, but they wouldn't get very much attention. And if the goal is to produce research that has impact, then you want to get some attention from your publications. That's the first thing on the academic side. If I don't reach that threshold, that'd be bad news. And I likely wouldn't be able to produce an academic article where I could disseminate the findings. That's the first thing I would say.
Gregory DeAngelo:
The second thing I would say with regards to really keeping a super high level of quality and ensuring that we get a causal story told in the end, is that's the only way that I even feel remotely close to comfortable in advising an agency on how to proceed forward. Given that lives could be impacted, people go to jail or prison and their lives are totally upended. The only way that we're going to proceed forward on making any sort of recommendation is if we achieve that very high standard of, we know, without any doubt, that this is the causal relationship between specific charging practices and community safety outcomes.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And if we don't have that, we're not proceeding forward. Why this matters on a larger scale though? I would say we have lots of policies that are being enacted right now. The pendulum I would say, especially in California, but I think even more generally in the US, has swung in the direction of decarceration, decriminalization. The intent is to not hurt people by getting them involved in the criminal justice system. And by that, I mean not getting them arrested, not getting them prosecuted, not putting them in jail. And from where I sit, I think we're introducing a lot of policies.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And I think the policies are far outpacing our knowledge of the impact of these policies. And that's where I get scared. I mean, right now, where we're at, I mean, in California, between AB 109, which was realignment, they moved a lot of prisoners out of prisons and into local jails, they crowded the local jails. As the local jails became crowded, they started releasing individuals from jail into the community. And there's only a certain amount of community supervision that one can engage in.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And then you fast forward a little bit further to Prop 47 and Prop 57, you've got additional propositions that are reducing sentences or decriminalizing certain behavior. And my experience talking with lots of criminal justice agencies is this is really creating a difficult situation for us in terms of the safety of our communities. And my answer to them is, I don't know if that's a true statement. We would need to test that. And so, I'm really simply pathetic to what they're saying.
Gregory DeAngelo:
Because to use a non-criminal justice example, if you have a child and they're engaging and the kid comes home late at past their curfew and you catch them and you say, I caught you coming home late. I'm not going to punish you though. I just want to tell you that I caught you. And I know that you came home late, but I'm not going to punish you. Would you expect them to stop coming home late? And the answer is like, I was a kid once and I think if my parents didn't punish me for coming home late, I would have stayed out later, longer, and longer, and longer.
Gregory DeAngelo:
Because there were no ramifications of that. And that's the concern that I keep hearing a lot of lately, is these decarceration or decriminalization policies seem to be making it ... That have less of a deterrent effect on people engaging in criminal conduct. Isn't that making our communities less safe? And my answer at this moment, although the lab is deeply engaged in answering these types of questions right now, is we're working on it. We don't quite know all the answers yet, but what you hypothesize seems reasonable. Let's look into your data and check this out.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And so, that's where we've been engaged for the last two, three years since the lab has gotten going, which has been a lot of fun. But at the same time, it's a slow process. Research is slow. And people would like answers yesterday. So, takes a little time, but we're slowly unraveling some answers. And I think we've given a lot of great opportunities to interact with these agencies to be able to provide answers. So I'm really hopeful for what the future will have for us in terms of providing important insights to the various agencies that we're working with.
Jeremy Byrum:
Awesome. Now, we're just at about our time for our show today. Where can they find or where can our audience members find you and the lab's work? Or do you guys have a website? Is there a place we can read your research papers?
Gregory DeAngelo:
Absolutely. The first thing I'd say is we have a lab website, which is the www.computationaljusticelab.org. You can find us there. We've got some Twitter presence, which we can share with you guys and some Facebook presence. The other thing I would say is we have biweekly lab group meetings that are open to the public and the community to sit in on and hear the research ideas we're working on. So if one is interested in participating in that, they can just reach out to me. My email is gregory.deangelo@cgu.edu.
Gregory DeAngelo:
And you can also read up on my research at my webpage, which is gregoryjdeangelo.com. And also, I encourage you guys to check out the faculty and students and interns and alumni that are all part of the lab, because there's just so many great people that are involved in the lab, and so much awesome research going on. We have a couple of junior faculty members in the lab who are engaged in some really cool research. CarlyWill Sloan and Matt Ross are just engaged in some really neat research, which I strongly encourage people to check out. And reach out to us.
Gregory DeAngelo:
You don't have to be an academic to write us and ask us questions. I sometimes get questions and calls from people who are just regular old people, who's hanging out. They've listened to this podcast or seen something that I've written that end up being featured in the newspaper, whatever. And those are some of my favorite exchanges, is when people just reach out to me by email or phone and engage with us. Because I learn so much from the community, especially people who have maybe unique insights into the criminal justice system. We're especially interested in talking with you. If you're thinking about writing, please do. I would look forward to that opportunity.
Jeremy Byrum:
Great. Well, on that note, we'll let you get back to work.
Gregory DeAngelo:
Alright.
Jeremy Byrum:
Sounds like you got a lot of students and are very busy, and we wish you continued success.
Gregory DeAngelo:
Thanks so much for having me.
Jeremy Byrum:
Alright. Thanks, Greg, for coming on. From Studio B3 at Claremont Graduate University, you've been listening to the Campfire. We'll see you next time.
From Fulbright Scholar to software engineer, CGU alum Sasa Arsic sits down with Jeremy to talk about his pathway through an MS in Information Systems & Technology to working at one of the world's leading companies in the Geographic Information Systems technology space.
For a transcript of this episode, email cgupodcasts at gmail.com and include the episode title.
In this episode of The Campfire Jeremy talks with CGU epidemiologist Nicole Gatto about her ongoing research into the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccines interact with our immune system in highly complex ways, as do vaccinated individuals with society at large. Discussion around viruses and vaccines has suddenly become part of a larger conversation about the shared risks and rewards of public life as the country slowly transitions to a state of post-COVID normalcy.
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Jeremy Byrum: Hi everybody, and thank you for joining us from wherever you may be. It's a
little chilly out there, so welcome to The Campfire. I'm your host Jeremy Byrum,
and today I'm excited to be joined by our very special guest CGU's very own
Nicole Gatto. Dr. Gatto is an associate professor in the School of Community &
Global Health at CGU, is the director of the PhD program in Health Promotion
Sciences, and the interim chair of the IRB. She earned a Master of Public Health
from the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA, and a PhD in epidemiology
from the Department of Preventative Medicine at USC'S Keck School of
Medicine. With experience in communicable disease control and prevention
with entities such as the LA County Department of Public Health, she focuses
her research predominantly on environmental, genetic and lifestyle risk, and
protective factors for chronic diseases. In the last year, she has lent her
expertise to work on COVID-19 including a recent collaboration on vaccine
hesitancy research with Riverside University Health System. Dr. Gatto is looking
forward to traveling to Iceland later this year as a Fulbright scholar now that the
previous pandemic restrictions to the program have been lifted. Nicole, thank
you so much for joining the show.
Dr. Nicole Gatt...: Jeremy, thank you so much for having me. It's great to have an opportunity to
speak with you.
Jeremy Byrum: Of course, and it's always great to talk to a public health expert and someone
with your expertise, especially now that we're in the later stages, I'll say, of the
pandemic, although it's crazy that we've experienced it now over the last year. I
felt like the year went by, well depending on who you ask, either fast or very
slow.
Dr. Nicole Gatt...: I agree with that.
Jeremy Byrum: Thank you for taking the time.
Dr. Nicole Gatt...: You're welcome.
Jeremy Byrum: So let's get started a little bit with a brief overview of your background, maybe a
little bit on epidemiology for those who aren't aware of what epidemiology
entails. So can you go over some of what you do?
Dr. Nicole Gatt...: Sure, absolutely. So Jeremy, I think that probably before a year ago, most
people had not even heard of epidemiology. And I can say this because when I
would introduce myself as an epidemiologist, most people would ask me if I
worked with bugs, I think they were thinking entomology, or second I would get
if I worked with skin, so I think they were thinking epidermis. But
epidemiologists are health scientists, we study diseases in human populations. I
often say that we bridge public health and medicine, and essentially
epidemiologists our goal is to understand risk factors, so things that make you
more likely to get a disease, as well as protective factors, so things that make
you less likely to get a disease. We then use our research, and others use our
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research really as the basis to make recommendations to prevent disease from
occurring in the first place, so there's the reference to preventive medicine.
So epidemiology, I think, as now most people appreciate, is a data-driven
science, so we do depend on data from human populations to be able to do our
work. So in doing our work, there's really two parts to it, so usually we begin by
observation. So we observe, we characterize, we summarize, so this is what I
usually tell my students is the who, what, when and where. We then use our
data to ask research questions, so this is where we're asking the why. We want
to know what are the explanations for the patterns that we observe in the data,
so we go about designing epidemiologic studies to be able to attempt to answer
these questions. And as far as my background, epidemiologists usually
characterize ourselves either as chronic disease epidemiologists or infectious
disease epidemiologists. And my expertise is predominantly in chronic disease
epi, but I do have experience in infectious disease when I conducted
surveillance of influenza and other respiratory viruses as an epidemiologist for
the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
And I would say because of the nature of this pandemic, I would liken it to all
hands on deck moment for epidemiologists. So even those of us who may not
have as much of a background in infectious disease epi, I think have been
prompted to do what we can to contribute to solving a piece of this puzzle. I've
consulted with organizations on developing protocols for safely returning to
work, I've provided media commentaries and I've also been active in a number
of research projects. So I published an article with Henry Schellhorn from
Mathematics on Optimal Control with Uncertainty, so this was using
mathematical modeling to predict conditions that are relevant to this pandemic.
I also published another article with Wallace Chipidza from Information Systems
on Early Media Coverage of the Pandemic, and pointed out opportunities for
public health communication. I have a current project with one of our
community partners, Pomona Valley Hospital and Medical Center, they were
examining predictors of hospital mortality among patients who have been
hospitalized with COVID. The project that I'd like to speak about today,
addresses a very important issue and an issue that I think essentially relates to
us being able to get out of this pandemic, and that is vaccine acceptance.
Jeremy Byrum: Yeah. And that's really interesting. And I'm along with that public group of
people who honestly didn't know what epidemiology was prior to COVID, so it
was one of those new... And I think it was one of those search terms too,
probably that when Google compiled the most searched terms in 2020, I'm sure
epidemiology was one of them.
Dr. Nicole Gatt...: And in the past I would say, well, epidemiology is from the root word epidemics.
And so we are scientists who study disease in population, and I think because
we hadn't had very many pandemics in our recent history that were of the scale
and magnitude of COVID, I would then have to explain, well, there are
epidemiologists who study other diseases like chronic diseases like myself.
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Jeremy Byrum: Yeah. And I think it was interesting what you said too in terms of infectious
diseases, you said that you did have some experience in studying influenza. So
when COVID started, I guess, when it came into the picture and it was compared
a lot with the Spanish influenza pandemic of, I think 1918, how and why, I guess
did... When you started learning about COVID, did it come into your radar?
Dr. Nicole Gatt...: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I remember quite vividly in January of last year, when I first
heard of the reports that were coming out of China of a series of cases of
pneumonia of unknown etiology, and when we hear the words unknown
etiology, usually that's when our antennas come up. And I remember at the
time my attention was definitely peaked, but I also remember feeling quite
worried. And that was in part because epidemiologists and public health
professionals have really anticipated for many years, the potential for a global
infectious disease pandemic like COVID-19. To your point of influenza, I think
many folks thought it might be an influenza pandemic, but it was not, it was a
coronavirus pandemic. Some of the reasons why we've been anticipating this
sort of pandemic, have to do with the increased globalization of trade and
travel. So really there's many more people mixing around the world, both
people and goods than ever before in our history.
I would also include the changing climate and our impact on the environment,
particularly our continuing encroachment on animal habitat. So really we have
the potential nowadays to come in contact with unknown pathogens like we
have not had before. So these are some of the ingredients that are there to
bring about these conditions for there to be a pandemic on this scale. And I can
really remember those first few months of the pandemic, the stay at home
order had been issued and I was stuck at home, and I really felt a sense of
helplessness, I really wanted to be out there helping however I could. And so
even though I have more of a background of chronic disease, I did take this as a
personal call to action to do what I could from my training and experience to try
to contribute to solving some piece of the problem.
Jeremy Byrum: Yeah. You mentioned a little bit on your training when COVID happened, right?
You basically had to shift your mindset from chronic to infectious diseases. So
what are some of the logistical elements of that? Like, of course in the
mainstream we've heard a lot about social distancing, mask wearing, and then
now vaccines, which again, we'll get to, but how did some of that inform your
consulting that you've been doing with these different entities?
Dr. Nicole Gatt...: That's a great question. So one of the main differences between infectious
disease epi and chronic disease epi is usually when we're talking about known
infectious diseases, epidemiologists will shift their focus to understanding other
aspects of how disease spreads. So we might try to understand more about
transmission, we might try to understand more about factors on the individual
level that might protect people, but in this case, when we're talking about an
unknown pathogen, one of the biggest challenges is the unknown. So you've
probably heard a number of scientists saying that we're learning to fly the plane
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as we're flying it, right? So there's a lot of information that we're learning as
we're going along that's influencing our recommendations, what we know and
understand about the virus. And it can be very challenging to be trying to issue
what I would call real time advice and guidance while you're going along and
learning about it. So, I mean, if you think about it, we've only really known
about this disease for a year. And I like to remind folks that some
epidemiologists, some scientists, in fact many, may spend their entire career
studying a disease. And in the larger scope of things, we really have not had that
much of experience with this particular virus and the disease that it causes.
Jeremy Byrum: Where does the history of vaccines come into play when it intersects with the
history of infectious disease and, I mean, by extension pandemics?
Dr. Nicole Gatt...: Yes. So from a public health perspective, the reality is that vaccines are one of
our interventions that are credited with contributing to significant declines in
infectious diseases during the 20th century and the accompanying increases in
life expectancy. So in the year 1900, the average person lived to be 47 years old,
in the year 2000, the average person lived to about 78 years in the United
States. So that's a 30 year increase in life expectancy that in part is due to our
control of infectious diseases, and one way that we've done that is through
vaccinations. So perhaps it might be a good idea to talk first about how modern
vaccines work and then cover a brief history of vaccine hesitancy. So to start
with, it's really important to know that our immune system is very smart. It can
sensitively discriminate between subtle differences for a huge number of
pathogens, so not only viruses, but bacteria, fungi, et cetera. And our immune
system learns the identity of pathogens when we're naturally exposed to them
and we get sick. It fights back against the pathogen by mounting an immune
defense to get us back on our feet, but the reality is that this takes time.
So as part of this response, our immune system remembers the pathogen, so
the next time we're exposed, it will respond more quickly and more intensely to
prevent us from getting sick. So what do vaccines do? So vaccines are really
teaching our immune system to recognize a pathogen without our having to be
exposed. So this effectively bypasses the time that's involved with the natural
learning process. So vaccination results in our immune system being able to
mount an immune response the first time we're exposed, preventing us from
getting sick in the first place. And there's many different types of modern
vaccines; there's inactivated, live attenuated, recombinant, viral vector, mRNA,
but they're all essentially working off that same premise that I just described.
There's a second way that modern vaccines "work", so in addition to protecting
the individual, modern vaccines work also by protecting the community, and
this we refer to as herd immunity. So essentially the concept is that when
enough people in a population are vaccinated to a disease and therefore
immune, if that disease were to enter the population, persons within the
population who are not vaccinated and not immune are indirectly protected by
those who are. So this I think is really important to why we all need to be
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vaccinated. Vaccines are protecting persons who are not choosing to be
vaccinated, so persons who are not choosing to be vaccinated are really being
able to enjoy the benefits from those of us who are. And I think it's also
important that we not lose sight of the fact that we're all members of a society,
we share a common environment, and we're really interdependent on each
other. So when we talk about the reasons why people may be hesitant to be
vaccinated, I think it's important to keep in mind some of the risks, which
hopefully we'll also be able to talk about, but as a punchline, as members of
communities, we really need to remember that we're sharing both the benefits
and the risks. And if we all do our part, we're going to be able to maximize the
rewards that we'll all share.
Jeremy Byrum: Right. And I think too, you mentioned in your talk a little bit outlining that
community as well, and also how the development of vaccines or I should say
the history of not only your anti-vaxxers, but also your vaccine hesitancy has
been around as long as the actual vaccines have. So can you go into a little bit of
that history as well and where some of that public hesitancy comes from?
Dr. Nicole Gatt...: Yeah. So in working on this project, I wanted to understand more about the
history of vaccine hesitancy. And I found that it's not a recent phenomenon. So
in fact, as I mentioned that health and medical scholars describe vaccination as
one of our achievements from a public health perspective, the opposition to
vaccination has almost existed as long as vaccination itself. And so some of this
has to do with the early inoculation practices dating back to the 1800s, so it was
not particularly painless, safe or sanitary to get vaccinated then. Governments
in the United States and in Britain imposed steep fines to people who didn't get
vaccinated or have their children vaccinated, so it was actually quite a punitive
system, it was costly to people who were working then. So fortunately since
then, public health has evolved away from these quite heavy-handed
approaches to prioritize and favor educational interventions.
But in modern times, anti-vaccination movements can be traced back to the
1970s when there was an international controversy over the safety of a
particular immunization called the DTP, or diptheria, tetanus, and pertussis
vaccination. There was a report from London, from a children's hospital at the
time, which claimed that 36 children suffered neurological conditions following
the DTP immunization. The opposition to the vaccination was fueled by
television documentaries and newspaper reports, a parent advocacy group, and
even some members of the medical profession. And unfortunately the
controversy affected vaccination rates even though advisory committees
reformed and confirmed the safety of that particular immunization. More
recently, if we look to the late 1990s, probably a better known controversy is
that over the MMR vaccine, so this is the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.
There was a British doctor in 1998 who published quite a well-known study that
suggested a possible relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism.
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So this was published in a well-known journal, the media picked up on it,
igniting public fear. There was confusion over the safety of the vaccine. As it
turns out that doctor was later investigated by the British Medical Council and
he eventually lost his license, this was because they identified some quite
serious violations, including a conflict of interest. There were issues with
consent in the study, and he even had falsified some data. The journal
eventually retracted the paper over 10 years later, but the damage
unfortunately had been done. There was an anti-vax movement, which had
grown out of this, it was credited as playing a role in the re-emergence of
measles in the United States and other countries. And this was even though
there had been a large number of studies which later confirmed that that
vaccine was safe, and none of them by the way, found a link between vaccine
and autism.
So if we look at the history, there are really three major themes that relate to
acceptance of vaccines, and I think we can see their roots historically. So the
first is governmental authority versus individual liberties. So here, right? The
concept is that people have a right to control their own bodies and those of
their children and not the government. The second major theme is that from
religious objections, so here is the belief that my body is pure, and vaccines are
unclean or unchristian, in part because of some of the animal roots of
vaccinations. And then third, relates to concerns about safety and the potential
harm caused by vaccines and especially to children. So these are themes that
are even true today, in people who feel hesitant about being vaccinated.
Jeremy Byrum: Right. And I think you said something interesting too, when it comes to the
damage already being done. I think probably a modern analog to that is the
recent reports of the single dose Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which had a
pause, and then now I believe doesn't have a pause. So I can imagine why that
still plays into today's society, where one report like that comes out and it has a
ripple effect into the community.
Dr. Nicole Gatt...: Yeah. I think people are probably coming in with some level of skittishness.
Unfortunately there's been a lot of misinformation which has been propelled
through social media, which I think is different than in the past. So information
is more readily available and so is misinformation. And the Johnson and Johnson
vaccine being paused, actually I think is a testament to our system working. So
we do have, and we can talk a little bit more about this later, we do have a
system that reviews vaccines before they're approved for use. That same
system also monitors the use of vaccines once they are being used in the
population. And it's set up to monitor potential adverse events in persons, and
then take a step back and confirm whether or not those are related to the
vaccine itself. So that I think is a bit more of a testament of our system working
the way that it should.
Jeremy Byrum: Right. And also about that system, so maybe we can go from there and then
transition that into some of the work you're doing in vaccine hesitancy research.
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Now with this vaccine particular, I know that there's several COVID vaccines,
and I think for emergency authorization in the US, there's at least several that
are available now, probably the two most popular are Pfizer and Moderna. Can
you speak to how that process worked and how we were able to get a vaccine
so quickly, and perhaps how that might lead to some of the hesitancy among
the public?
Dr. Nicole Gatt...: Sure, absolutely. So what's going on behind the scenes, which I think may not be
quite as much in the public consciousness is that, these vaccines or their
platforms have been in development for years. So for example, the mRNA
vaccines, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, even though they are a new
technology in terms of a vaccine that we're using now, those have actually been
in development for a decade. So even though they are new, the research that
has contributed to building the foundation has actually been around for quite a
long time. So before a vaccine can be used in the United States, it has to go
through a series of rigorous studies. So these begin in the lab, they continue in
animals, and then they progress into humans. And folks hear about clinical
trials, so there's actually three rounds of clinical trials in humans that must be
conducted before a vaccine or actually any drug, can be approved by the FDA
for use in the United States.
Emergency use authorization is a designation which can move along more
quickly the release of the medication or the vaccine to the public, but it has not
shortcut all of that work that I just described that goes into the development of
the therapeutic or the vaccine. So there are a team of scientists and medical
doctors at the FDA who are reviewing all of the data from those studies, they're
looking for safety, they're looking for effectiveness, and that essentially is what
goes into the approval process. And then as I mentioned, the FDA is also
involved in ensuring the safety of vaccines after they've been approved. So they
check vaccine manufacturing sites, they inspect them to make sure that they're
following good manufacturing procedures, they also monitor the use of the
vaccine in the general population. So clinical trials are large, but they're
enrolling on the order of tens of thousands of people. Once the vaccine is used
by the public, we're talking about millions of people who now are taking them,
so the FDA is monitoring the population for the occurrence of more rare
adverse events that we may not have detected in clinical trials. And their work is
focused on looking to see whether those potential adverse events may actually
be linked to the vaccine or not.
And think about it this way, the reality is that when we're talking about millions
of people, there is the potential for us to see the occurrence of rare events, just
because we have so many people that we're following that the potential is
greater. So it could be by chance alone, that we're detecting these adverse
events. So think about it this way, it may be that even if those people had not
been vaccinated, they still may have experienced that adverse event like a blood
clot. So the task of scientists involved in this type of work is to review medical
records and try to determine whether there's a link between that medical event
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and the vaccination, it could just be a coincidence. And so far, the rare side
effects that have been detected are the severe allergic reactions, so the
anaphylaxis, and this has been recorded to occur at an extremely low rate. So I
think it's five cases per 1,000,000 doses for Pfizer and three cases per 1,000,000
doses of Moderna, so that's extremely rare. And it seems that this has mainly
occurred in women and people with a history of allergies.
And one of the ways that we take steps to keep an eye on folks is, what
happened after you got vaccinated? Well, you are to wait for 15 minutes. So
wait in the vaccine site for 15 minutes, and this is because we want to check to
make sure that folks don't have an allergic reaction. If they did, there would be
these steps taken to help them, medical care would be called and we would
take steps to treat them for that. The second, which is the reports that have
come out for the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, this is the rare occurrence of
brain blood clots. And the most recent statistics are showing 15 confirmed cases
among nearly 8 million doses, so this is also extremely rare. And we're talking
about less than one in a million or thereabouts of these different adverse events
for both the Pfizer, Moderna and the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. So if you put
this into perspective, the lifetime risk of dying from a motor vehicle accident is
one in 107 in the United States but we're still driving, right?
There's a background risk that's just associated with living and the different
things that we do as part of our life, so there's a risk associated with driving, but
yet we all still drive, right? If you're interested in the risk of winning the lottery,
in the California super lottery, a jackpot of 41 million, your odds are one in 41
million of winning that. So actually putting this in perspective, the risks
associated with these vaccines are extremely low. And scientist's part of the
task is to adjudicate whether the benefit is outweighed by the risks, and
scientists looking at the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, their conclusion is that
the benefits do outweigh the risk of vaccination with that particular vaccine
platform.
Jeremy Byrum: A calculated risk, right? Okay. So how does that play into some of the research
you're doing now in vaccine hesitancy with particularly Riverside University
Health System, where does that research come into play?
Dr. Nicole Gatt...: Yeah. Good question. So coming back to our project with Riverside University
Health System, so this is an integrated health network in Riverside County. It's
one of our community partners here at CGU. Riverside University Health System
serves about 2.3 million residents of Riverside County. So we had a couple of
goals for this particular project, and why would we be even interested in
studying this issue in the health system? Well, so first of all, Riverside University
Health System frontline workers, so there are doctors, nurses, physician
assistants, et cetera, who work there. This was the first group to be vaccinated
in California, as well as nationally. These are folks who interact with patients so
certainly there is the potential there for them to be exposed and protection
from vaccination is important. And also there's the secondary issue, may they
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have an influence on patients? So in other words, could their personal opinion
about vaccines matter when they interact with patients?
Riverside University Health System is also a large employer in Riverside County,
so not only are we studying frontline workers, but the employees likely
represent a cross section of the Riverside County population. So there's the
factors that make this an important group to study. There's two important
factors also to keep in mind as we talk about this work, the first is that the
vaccine is offered at the workplace at RUHS. So in other words, folks who work
there do not have to sign up on that My Turn site like the public does, so this
greatly facilitates the administration of the vaccine. The second thing is that
persons who are working at RUHS are likely to still be employed, so unlike other
sectors or employers who laid off their employees, that was for the most part,
not the case with Riverside.
So we had a couple of objectives of this project, the first was to assess levels of
vaccine hesitancy in employees of Riverside University Health System. We
wanted to really understand what could be some of the driving factors or the
determinants that influenced their decision to either accept vaccination, to
refuse it, or to be hesitant about it. And the reason why we were interested in
that is because we are a program of health promotion, so the idea is that we
may be able to develop targeted interventions that could address those factors.
Also, from my review of the literature, this is the most comprehensive survey
among healthcare workers and health system employees to date. So there had
been another study conducted by UCLA, but this was previous to vaccines even
being released. So going back to September and October of last year, UCLA
surveyed its employees and found that there was some apprehension over
adverse events associated with vaccines.
There was a recent Kaiser Family Foundation, Washington Post survey in March
of healthcare workers, which also showed that a percentage of them were
hesitant. Americans also have some level of hesitancy, and it seems that there's
about a 10% to 15% stubborn group over time, I mean, that that number is
stubbornly not changing over time who say that they won't get vaccinated. So it
is important again, going back to herd immunity, that we maximize the number
of people who receive a vaccination because this is going to offer the larger
society protection from COVID.
Jeremy Byrum: Now what's some of the inferences we can make from the data you've collected
so far? Given this is a new project, I'm sure it'll be ongoing. And with how
comprehensive it is, I'm sure you're getting a lot of responses for sure.
Dr. Nicole Gatt...: Yeah. So we developed a survey, this was a collaborative effort between CGU
and Riverside University Health System. They have a research center there that
we worked with. We didn't reinvent the wheel, so we did model our survey
after a previous published survey, so the WHO has worked quite a bit in this
area. We included different questions, we wanted to understand demographic
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factors, we wanted to understand person's knowledge and experience with
COVID, their hesitancy with vaccines, we also wanted to collect data on a
number of different influences that might be shaping their opinion. So these
were contextual influences, individual and group influences, and then vaccine
specific issues. So we started administering the survey, March 15th, we closed it
this past Monday on April 26th. We sent it out to about 2,500 Riverside
University Health System employees, we heard back from 714 of them, so that's
about a 29% response rate. A large proportion of the people who answered the
survey were nurses or had administrative positions.
We asked them about their weekly level of exposure, and some of them had no
exposure, some of them had minimal, moderate or high exposure. So that was
relatively equally distributed among the persons who responded. There was a
significant percentage of them who reported having underlying health
conditions like hypertension, like asthma, like diabetes, and overall probably no
surprise because of the health system employees, they were very
knowledgeable of COVID symptoms and disease. So at the time of the survey,
83% of the persons who responded had received either one or two doses of
COVID vaccine, so 17% had not been vaccinated yet. So we continued to ask
that 17% additional questions, we wanted to know when the opportunity arises
for them to be vaccinated, will they be? And 12% said they would, 50% said they
would not, and about 40%, so 38% said they were unsure.
So we continued to probe them with a question of whether they would be
vaccinated at a later date, and 19% of them said, yes, we had a proportion who
said they were unsure, and we had some that said, no. So overall we have about
7% of the people who we surveyed who said they were hesitant, and about 6%
who said they refused. So these percentages are lower than what we find in the
US population and other surveys of healthcare workers, but it still does reflect
an important 12% of the employees who we may be able to target with
interventions.
Jeremy Byrum: And I think that, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, I was just going to say, I think
that's really interesting when you were mentioning about the public perspective
versus the expertise perspective of not only diseases, but also vaccines. I think
that's an interesting statistic given that these are healthcare workers.
Dr. Nicole Gatt...: Correct. Now we do have to keep in mind that this reflects people who
responded, so we are missing out on the opinions of persons who didn't
respond. And it could be that because such a large proportion of people who
are vaccinated responded, this data may not necessarily reflect everybody's
perspective within Riverside University Health, but we are going to continue to
look at that more closely. We wanted to understand the determinants of
vaccine acceptance, hesitancy, and refusal, so we asked all of the people who
responded a set of questions to try to understand the reasons that might
influence their decision to get vaccinated. So we gave them 17 reasons, we
asked them to rate these reasons using a Likert scale, so whether these reasons
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definitely would, definitely would not, probably would, or probably would not,
influence their decision. And we also had a category for not sure.
So we asked them questions like, would getting paid time off influence your
decision, would an influential religious leader, would assurances that the
vaccine was safe, what about if the vaccine was a requirement to attend social
or sporting events? So we asked them these set of questions and asked them to
rate the importance that they would give to these different reasons. So among
the persons who were vaccinated, and this is I think really interesting data so
far, among the persons who had been vaccinated, there were some themes that
came out in the responses. So these were people who we felt were relatively
altruistic. So scanning the reasons that they gave, they were not motivated by
money, paid time off, other incentives, but they did report being influenced by
knowing somebody who got sick from COVID, or receiving encouragement from
a family member to get vaccinated.
We also saw themes that related to professional motivations and an indication
that they rely on knowledge of medicine and science in their responses. Now,
this was different than the group who were hesitant. So among those who said
they were unsure, looking at their responses, the responses concentrated really
squarely in the middle of the Likert scale. So regardless of the reason that we
asked, these folks reported that they were not sure. So the theme that emerges
here is a level of uncertainty and indecision across the board. In the third group,
those who refused to be vaccinated, it was interesting. So again, looking at
where the response is concentrated, regardless of what we asked these folks,
they said it definitely would not influence them. So a theme that emerged here,
was that nothing may sway these folks. So we really need to take this into
consideration when we think about, okay, if we want to develop educational
interventions, how are we going to reach both our folks who refuse to be
vaccinated and our folks who report being hesitant? So this helps us think about
different strategies that we could use with either group.
Jeremy Byrum: Now, as a bit of I guess some parting words from your perspective as an
epidemiologist, earlier you mentioned that your field bridges the medical
sciences and the public health side, how can a study like this inform the public
health response for, as you said, getting out, I think is the words you used, of
this pandemic or any kind of pandemic or public health issue we may face in the
future?
Dr. Nicole Gatt...: Yeah. So I think that by looking at the responses, we may be able to develop
educational interventions that assure people of the safety and efficacy of
vaccines. So if they're hesitant because they're worried about, for example, you
brought up, why was it that these vaccines were released so quickly? Well,
perhaps if we explain the context and provide greater information that, well,
even though it appears that they were released quickly, there was actually years
of research that went into the development of these vaccines. And we can look
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at some of the other responses as well, to see where we may be able to reach
other groups that report being either hesitant or refusing a vaccine.
Jeremy Byrum: All right. Well, thank you so much, Nicole, your breadth of knowledge, it just
seems very... You definitely have the expertise in this field, and I'm glad we
were able to talk to you to get some of that perspective for those who might not
know again, what epidemiology is. So we really appreciate it. Where can we find
your work particularly on COVID, but just in general and what you're doing right
now?
Dr. Nicole Gatt...: Yeah. Well, thank you again for having me. It was great to have an opportunity
to talk about the work that we're doing at CGU, with our community partners,
with our students. So if you're interested in finding more about my work, you
can check out my website, which is www.nicolemgatto.com. There you'll be able
to find copies of my published articles and some of the other areas of research
that I'm interested in.
Jeremy Byrum: Perfect. And is there anybody else you wanted to shout out in terms of
collaborators that helped make a lot of this work possible?
Dr. Nicole Gatt...: Certainly, I can mention by name, let me get my page here so I don't forget.
Certainly, so I can acknowledge we have a great team at CGU, Debbie Freund is
my colleague on this project, a number of students that are working with us,
both in public health and economics. Also, our collaborators at Riverside
University Health System, Doctor Anthony Firek and Judi Nightingale, as well as
a number of their employees and volunteers who, without them, this work
would really not be possible.
Jeremy Byrum: Fantastic. Well, thank you to them and thank you to you, Nicole, for your
expertise and for coming on today.
Dr. Nicole Gatt...: Thank you for having me, Jeremy.
Jeremy Byrum: From Studio B3 at Claremont Graduate University, you've been listening to The
Campfire. We'll see you next time.
CGU doctoral student Randal Johnson specializes in stress elimination. After many years of searching for answers in religion, philosophy, science, and personal development programs after walking away from a stressful and dissatisfying corporate career, Randall found the secrets to living successfully without stress and compiled them into his new book: The Seven Secrets of a Stress Free Life. In this episode of The Campfire Jeremy talks with Randall about his work as a doctoral student of religion and his discoveries on the path to a better life.
For a transcript of this episode, email cgupodcasts at gmail.com and include the episode title.
For our first episode of The Campfire, we interview Diane Chase, vice president for academic innovation, student success, and strategic initiatives at Claremont Graduate University. Thanks to Diane and her team, CGU has been particularly successful in helping students transition to a temporary, hybrid-online learning model. Unlike many universities seeing shortfalls during the pandemic, CGU enrollment has remained stable. Diane is also an archeologist. For over 25 years she and her husband Arlen Chase, a professor at Pomona College, have directed archaeological excavations at Caracol, Belize. In this episode, Jeremy talks with Diane about how she cultivates success in higher education as both an administrator and archaeologist.
For a transcript of this episode, email cgupodcasts at gmail.com and include the episode title.