Jennifer Nuzzo
Jennifer Nuzzo is an American epidemiologist, an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering and the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Nuzzo co-lead the development of the Global Health Security Index, an assessment of global health security capabilities in 195 countries, performed by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security together with The Economist Intelligence Unit. She is the director and principal investigator of the Outbreak Observatory, a research project working to document infectious disease outbreaks and how governments respond to them. Nuzzo serves as an associate editor of the Health Security journal.
Nuzzo has often appeared in the media discussing how health systems respond to outbreaks. She has helped bring attention to dangers of delaying vaccination, the spread of the ebola virus, and the 2019–2020 coronavirus pandemic. She got her undergraduate degree from Rutgers.
Nuzzo was criticized for comments on the George Floyd protests in which large numbers of people broke social distancing and lockdown rules during the COVID-19 shutdown; she said that to not protest against racial inequality would cause greater public health risks than the virus.
