A cultural evolutionary model of the interaction between parental beliefs and behaviors, with applications to vaccine hesitancy

Vaccine Hesitancy and Public Mistrust during Pandemic Decline: Findings from 2021 and 2023 Cross-Sectional Surveys in Northern Italy

“…The significant decrease in parents’ belief in the importance of protecting children through vaccination and ensuring herd immunity is alarming [ 42 ]. This shift might reflect the heightened anxieties and uncertainties brought about by the pandemic, potentially affecting long-standing attitudes towards routine childhood vaccinations.…”

“…The increased reporting of negative vaccine experiences in families further complicates this scenario, potentially leading to a more personal and anecdotal basis for vaccine hesitancy [ 19 ]. The data indicate a complex evolution in public attitudes towards vaccination during and after the COVID-19 pandemic [ 42 ]. While the majority consistently expressed no change in their stance towards mandatory vaccinations for diseases other than COVID-19, the subtle shifts observed suggest an underlying reassessment of health priorities and trust in public health guidance over time in South Tyrol.…”

Internal and external factors affecting vaccination coverage: Modeling the interactions between vaccine hesitancy, accessibility, and mandates

“…We build on a more general cultural niche construction framework of [ 9 , 39 ] to assess the effects of two external factors, vaccine mandates and vaccine accessibility, on the resulting landscape of vaccination coverage and vaccine confidence. For a population of individuals, we track the status of vaccination coverage and vaccine confidence over time; within this population, individuals mate, decide whether to vaccinate their offspring, and transmit a vaccine attitude trait.…”

“…The simulation is run until phenotype frequencies reach equilibrium ( Fig 1 , Table 1 ). For more detail see S1 Text and [ 9 ]. The code for the simulations is written in MATLAB and is provided at www.github.com/CreanzaLab/Vaccine-Hesitancy and http://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.22493317 .…”

“…We adapted a cultural niche construction framework to model vaccination beliefs and behaviors, incorporating the transmission of vaccination culture both from parents and from the community [ 9 ], and we used current estimates of vaccination rates and vaccine attitude frequencies obtained from various sources in the literature, including reports of Measles-Mumps-Rubella uptake from the United States [ 41 , 42 ], as a starting point our model. Using this model, we previously demonstrated that the overarching cultural landscape, including the likelihood of adopting vaccine hesitancy and the probability of transmitting it to one’s children, determines the equilibrium levels of vaccination coverage and vaccine hesitancy in a population.…”