A special exhibition at the Mütter Museum highlights the roles Penn played in developing COVID-19 vaccines and trying to foster confidence in them.
By Julia M. Klein
The five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 public health emergency has sparked a stream of reflections on the pandemic’s impacts and lessons. One such contribution, at the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, is Trusted Messengers: Community, Confidence, and Covid-19. The show, on view through February 2, 2026, highlights the roles Penn played in both developing mRNA vaccines and boosting vaccine acceptance.
Adapted from an exhibition at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Museum in Atlanta, this modest, local version discusses an array of community health initiatives—including the University’s varied collaborations in West Philadelphia—designed to increase vaccine uptake. A timeline on the gallery floor pinpoints (mostly grim) pandemic milestones. The exhibition also poses more general questions about the relationship between trust and public health, while allowing visitors to draw conclusions of their own.
“We’re hoping that people take away the very basic point that in order to trust the message, you have to trust a messenger, and that will require different tactics for different types of people,” says Erin Mcleary G’97 Gr’01, the Mütter Museum’s senior director of collections and research and a member of the four-person curatorial team.
Penn’s greatest contribution was the pathbreaking work on mRNA vaccine technology by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, joint winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine [“Nobel Cause,” Nov|Dec 2023]. Weissman is the Roberts Family Professor in Vaccine Research and director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation at Penn Medicine. Karikó, formerly senior vice president at BioNTech, is an adjunct professor of neurosurgery.
Their mRNA research made possible both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which are credited with saving millions of lives. The exhibition displays pipettes and test tubes from their laboratory, as well as first-batch vials of those two vaccines. A 2021 Time magazine issue on display dubbed them “The Miracle Workers.”
Penn also was active in spreading vaccine awareness and acceptance. Trusted Messengers describes several of those efforts without assessing their results.
Penn Medicine’s Department of Family Medicine and Community Health led an umbrella group, VaxUpPhillyFamilies, that trained West Philadelphia parents and caregivers as vaccine ambassadors. Philly Teen Vaxx was an initiative of the School District of Philadelphia, Ala Stanford’s Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium, and the Policy Lab of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Penn’s pediatric partner. The group’s teen ambassadors organized vaccination clinics and created social media content, promoting vaccination—and building community—with basketball, music, and free food.
Another Perelman School of Medicine community initiative was Safe Haircuts As We Reopen Philadelphia, or SHARP, which enlisted local salon and barbershop owners and faith leaders—quintessential trusted messengers—to share why they chose to get vaccinated.
One attention-grabbing exhibit not involving Penn is an animated music video by Hip Hop Public Health, a nonprofit cofounded by neurologist Olajide Williams and hip hop artist Doug E. Fresh. Its catchy verses, written by Baltimore teens for their peers, sought to rebut anti-vax myths and tout the virtues of vaccination.
Also arresting are grainy, solitary portraits of Philadelphia nurses by photographer Kyle Cassidy. Cassidy printed them using the inner fabric of discarded surgical masks and paired them with oral histories for a separate book project. One excerpt describes a nurse’s frustrations when treating an unvaccinated patient. “You’re prolonging the problem that is pushing everyone to the edge and yet I have to save your life,” she complained in February 2022.
The exhibition reminds us that COVID-19 unleashed a flood of information, not all of it reliable. It includes a large photograph of Anthony Fauci, then-director of the NIH’s Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and an important public health spokesman—hero to some and villain to others. Other images convey early-pandemic messages urging people to stay home and socially distance (a phrase that hasn’t worn well with time).
In terms of inspiring trust, family and friends consistently rank high, the exhibition says. (Whether that trust is warranted is another story; no word here on what happens if one’s intimates purvey conspiracy theories.) In other instances, demographic divides emerge: Older people are more likely to trust politicians than are younger ones; urbanites place more stock in doctors, scientists, and teachers than do rural Americans.
Trusted Messengers is deliberately limited in its focus. It doesn’t attempt to analyze what the experts got wrong as both the virus and scientific understandings mutated. Nor does it discuss how evolving messages—on masks, vaccination, and more—themselves undermined trust. It offers just fragmentary takes on a complicated subject and is best viewed as part of a panoply of anniversary offerings.
To cite just one other example: Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee’s In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton University Press, 2025) takes a far more critical look at the underpinnings and effects of pandemic public health measures. The two Princeton political scientists argue that all our lockdowns, social distancing efforts, school closures, and possibly even masking did little or nothing to affect COVID mortality. What’s more, they say, the imposition of these measures caused serious harms, to the economy, education, social and political cohesion, individual physical and emotional well-being, and democracy itself. In accepting (insufficiently grounded) expert advice, the book suggests that the public was, if anything, too trusting.
