By Isabella Senno
When most people take three days off, they relax, but not Emilee Gibson.
University of Iowa student Gibson, the executive director of the ImmUNITY campaign, recently traveled to Washington, D.C., from Feb. 27 to March 1 with a group of six other UI student advocates to take part in the 2017 Shot@Life Champion Summit. The summit is an annual gathering meant to bring together volunteers from across the nation and increase their knowledge of global childhood immunizations and the U.S. advocacy process.
According to the latest numbers from Shot@Life, the seven students mingled with more than 100 other volunteers from 34 states and Washington. Gibson said the crowd included health-care professionals, parents, bloggers, and students.
“It feels very powerful to be a part of something,” Gibson said. “I think as younger members of the Champion cohort overall, it’s really exciting that we’re already getting to take part in something like this.”
Gibson said the second day of the conference is known as “Hill Day” and is the pinnacle of the conference, with volunteers meeting with members of Congress in their offices on Capitol Hill. The student advocates met with representatives and their staffers from both Iowa and Illinois to discuss the possibility of increasing and maintaining federal funding for global vaccine programs.
“I think it was pretty important because right now is a very politically chaotic time, but we know … [that] vaccines are the solution to ending countless preventable deaths every year,” Gibson said. “It’s really important that we were able to advocate for them and also getting to take part in being a member of democracy. In reality, our members of Congress are there to listen to us, and so I think it was really important that we exercised that ability to advocate for something that we’re really all passionate about.”
The group met with Rep. Dave Loebsack, D-Iowa, and with staffers from the offices of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, as part of the more than 100 meetings that took place on Hill Day. Sameen Hosseini, the assistant director of campaigns and outreach for ImmUNITY, said the “divide and conquer” strategy allowed the group to spread its message to more individuals.
“Every staff person or member of Congress we talked to had some reason that they felt global vaccines were important in some way, whether it was the moral obligation to provide vaccines to other countries or the national security issue that if there’s disease in other countries, it’s a threat here, too, and some offices felt really strongly that it’s a good investment to try to improve global health,” said Faradis Lindblom, marketing director for ImmUNITY. (Editor’s note: Lindbolm was previously a Daily Iowan reporter.) “The responses were, for the most part, pretty positive. Obviously, foreign aid is under a lot of scrutiny at the moment, and we could kind of feel that in some of the offices, but for the most part, I think everyone could agree that delivering life-saving vaccines to children in other countries is [important].”
Global-vaccination programs and global health have been debated over for the past several years, with recent research done by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit that studies key health-policy issues, showing that nearly half of Americans support the U.S. continuing to fund global-health initiatives.
“My No. 1 priority is that everybody should have access to health care, no matter where they’re from, no matter what their race, no matter what their religion, every single person on Earth deserves to have basic access to health care, and unfortunately, that’s not something that we see across the globe,” Hosseini said. “It’s really just about morals and us being able to care for each other no matter who the other person is. We have brothers and sisters all over the world, and they all deserve to have a shot at a healthy, happy life.”
