Roger Baxter, MD

Is a vaccine safe? Is it effective? Roger Baxter, MD has spent much of his career answering those critical questions, to the benefit of people around the globe.

Since 2006, Dr. Baxter has been co-director of the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center, one of the country’s major surveillance centers for vaccine safety. He is principal investigator for many ongoing studies of vaccines, biologics, and the epidemiology of infectious diseases, and has published extensively on vaccine safety and effectiveness.

His contributions include clinical trials leading to vaccine licensure, and the creation of an infrastructure that facilitates and enhances research efforts within KP. He helped develop a novel casecentered approach for vaccine safety studies that overcomes many of the variables inherent in other study methods. Dr. Baxter’s research has advanced medical knowledge about an array of vaccines. He led efforts to show that vaccines do not increase the risk for Guillain-Barré syndrome, and he proved the long-term effectiveness of the varicella vaccine in preventing chicken pox and shingles.

He also published three important studies on pertussis vaccines showing that older whole-cell vaccines were more effective than newer acellular pertussis vaccines, which lose their effectiveness over time. Based on these findings, he’s become an outspoken advocate for the need for improved pertussis vaccines.