UBC prof takes to TikTok to teach others about COVID-19 vaccine

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – A UBC professor is sharing her knowledge about the COVID-19 vaccine through social media and hopes others do the same.

Dr. Anna Blakney, assistant professor with UBC Biomedical Engineering, was recruited to share her expertise on social media through a joint effort by the UN Verified Initiative and the Vaccine Confidence Project.

“The whole idea is to connect scientists and clinicians who are working on COVID-19 to the general public over TikTok to be able to show them here’s what we do in the lab, here’s how we make and test vaccines and be able to answer any questions that they may have,” she says. 

While she knew the social media platform was popular with young people, she wasn’t sure what to think about the idea at first.

Now she has more than 200,000 followers ok TikTok, and she’s urging clinicians and scientists to get online and share their knowledge. Blakney says she gets a lot of questions and people are mostly receptive to the answers she has.

“People often [ask] ‘is this vaccine rushed? They see that It normally takes five to 10 years to develop a vaccine and you know we were able to do it in nine months and have multiple approved vaccines within a year of a brand new virus. The other one we get is, ‘are there any side effects or long term safety effects from the vaccine?’ Now we have loads of safety data on the vaccines because of all the clinical trials, but they’ve also been you know administered to millions of people all over the world.”

In the meantime, Blakney is going to be setting up her brand new lab at UBC where her work on vaccines will continue.