Ben Lopman Delivers 2026 Morgan Lecture

In 2006, rotavirus—a pathogen most people have never heard of—was killing 500,000 children a year. That's 1,400 kids a day. The numbers were known inside public health circles, but invisible elsewhere, until a rhetorical question from Bill Gates helped galvanize a global effort that has since prevented an estimated 800,000 deaths.

That story—of how science establishes what kills, and what can stop it—was at the center of this year's Morgan Distinguished Faculty Lecture, delivered by Ben Lopman, PhD, professor of epidemiology. His talk, "The Infectious Diseases We Choose," traced the arc of vaccine epidemiology from the painstaking surveillance work that makes disease burden visible, through the clinical trials and effectiveness studies that tell us whether an intervention works in the real world, to the political moment that is now putting decades of progress at risk.

Lopman argued that the biggest challenge has always been endemic disease. These are those pathogens so constant that they are easy to overlook, like seasonal flu, RSV, and rotavirus-caused disease without drama. "The deadliest diseases," he said, "are often the ones we've stopped seeing."

He was direct about what is now being lost. Vaccine coverage is falling. The expert advisory committee that has underpinned U.S. immunization policy for decades has been reconstituted with vaccine skeptics. Lopman's own research group built a tool called VaxImpactMap that translates coverage declines into projected hospitalizations, deaths, and monetary costs. The numbers represent real choices that are being made now, and children will pay for them.

The lecture closed on a more personal note. Drawing on a decade of meditation practice, he argued that the concept of metta, or loving-kindness, offers something useful to scientists in this moment: a way of holding the weight of what is happening, of caring about the children who will get sick from preventable diseases, without being consumed by it. Despair and apathy accomplish nothing. What helps is doing the work.

Watch a recording of the lecture here.