Presidents and vaccines: head of state inoculation as a tool for vaccine promotion.

Introduction: Vaccine hesitancy, an important threat to global health, has increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The public vaccination of high-profile figures, such as heads of state, has been touted as a potential tool for increasing vaccine acceptance among the general population. However, systematic information on such role modelling is lacking and existing studies focus on a small number of high-income countries.

Covid-19 vs. Ebola: Impact on households and small businesses in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo.

In April 2020, the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo was facing two major infectious disease outbreaks: Covid-19 and Ebola Virus Disease (EVD). We highlight large differences in the socioeconomic impact of these two outbreaks. The data come from a phone survey that we conducted in the period May-July 2020 with 637 households and 363 small firms from a megacity and two rural communes in the province of North Kivu.

Institutional mistrust and child vaccination coverage in Africa.

Introduction: Despite considerable improvements in vaccination coverage over the last decade, half of the world's unvaccinated and undervaccinated children are located in Africa. The role of institutional trust in explaining vaccination gaps has been highlighted in several qualitative reports but so far has only been quantified in a small number of high-income countries.

Methods: We matched information on child vaccination status from the Demographic Health Surveys with information on institutional trust from the Afrobarometer surveys at the subnational level.

More legislation, more violence? The impact of Dodd-Frank in the DRC.

The Dodd Frank Act was passed by the US Congress in July 2010 and included a provision-Section 1502-that aimed to break the link between conflict and minerals in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. To date there is only one rigorous quantitative analysis that investigates the impact of Dodd-Frank on local conflict events. Looking at the short-term impact (2011-2012), it finds that the policy backfired.