At home and overseas, Florencia Polite is on a mission to help patients and physicians understand how RSV vaccines protect newborns.
2 min. read
When she was 7 years old, Florencia Politedecided to become a doctor. “I loved the idea of having a career where every day I get to feel like I am helping someone,” she said. Her choice represented a departure from a family tradition—or so she thought.
Florencia Polite, Penn Medicine’s chief of Academic Specialists in Obstetrics and Gynecology and vice chair of the department’s clinical operations.
(Image: Courtesy of Penn Medicine News)
Many of Polite’s family members were educators. Indeed, her grandparents helped open schools for Black students in then-segregated parts of the United States. “Education has been the lens with which I have come to medicine,” said Polite, who is now Penn Medicine’s chief of Academic Specialists in Obstetrics and Gynecology and vice chair of the department’s clinical operations. That focus on teaching shows itself when she is training students at the Perelman School of Medicine or engaging one-on-one with her patients to help them learn about their care. Being a physician draws on her “natural gifts and talents” in this way.
In the last few years, however, Polite has leaned into a new role for her latent inner educator: vaccine advocacy, on a broad level. “It’s been my evolution as a physician,” she said, “continuing to educate in all these different settings.” Most recently, she has trained physicians globally about a relatively new vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which can cause serious illness in newborns and young infants, among other at-risk groups. While the vaccine does not protect most pregnant women directly, it does protect their babies. For Polite, sharing this powerful knowledge with both patients and their physicians presents a meaningful opportunity to have an impact, and to save lives across the globe—as well as close to home.
As an OB/GYN, Polite is well-practiced in counseling her pregnant patients about the value of vaccination. The COVID-19, flu, and Tdap shots are all recommended prenatally, so that when a pregnant patient receives the vaccine their immunity can be passed on to their newborn. She’ll also often advise and answer questions about other vaccines outside of pregnancy, from human papillomavirus shots that can help teens and adults potentially avoid cancer later in life, to the shingles, pneumonia, and RSV shots recommended for older adults.
All these vaccine conversations, and the evolution of what her patients need over time, form a microcosm of what she loves about her field—“the longitudinal relationships.” Polite can take care of a young person whose main goal may be avoiding pregnancy and remain that patient’s trusted physician as they reach a stage where they perhaps decide to have children. She may even be asked to take care of a patient’s sister, mother, or daughter, enabling her to care for patients across different stages of life: “That to me is the biggest compliment you can get, is when someone says they want you to care for a member of their family.”
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