‘I Think I Made The Right Decision … I Hope I'm Not Wrong’. Vaccine hesitancy, commitment and trust among parents of young children

Abstract

During the last decade, public health research has emphasised the growing public disaffection with vaccination. This contemporary vaccine hesitation (VH) refers to a delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines, as well as agreement despite doubt and reluctance. We investigated VH among French parents of young children, with an emphasis on two key features of VH: trust towards physicians and commitment to vaccination issues. We targeted two populations with contrasting socioeconomic profiles, using in‐depth interviews (n = 25). Most parents exhibited some kind of VH, with differentiated attitudes across vaccines, including acceptance despite enduring doubts, especially for vaccines already provided to older siblings (‘vaccine inertia’). Despite the rise of the Internet and social media, our participants still strongly relied on face‐to‐face interactions with peers and significant others. Most participants trusted their own physician but this was the result of a selection process: they had engaged resources to find a physician they could trust. Participants with contrasted socioeconomic profiles struggled with the same dilemmas, and they committed themselves to the same quest to find the ‘right’ physician. Nevertheless, parents with a higher socioeconomic status were able to engage more resources and use a wider repertoire of actions, and they also displayed greater health literacy.

Asymmetric participation of defenders and critics of vaccines to debates on French-speaking Twitter

“…Should public doctors, experts and public authorities publicly defend a commercial product? In most developed countries, including France, public authorities are seen as being too close to pharmaceutical companies which contributes to a lack of trust in vaccines 1,3,[47][48][49] . On the one hand, defending a specific commercial vaccine can reinforce the impression that financial interests bear on vaccination policies and market authorizations.…”

“…The use of aluminium in vaccines has been at the core of most debates around vaccination in France since 2010 while it has not emerged as an object of major concern outside the French-speaking world 29 . Conversely, the dominance of vaccine defenders in discussions around the MMR vaccine could reflect the fact that this vaccine has not been the object of strong critical mobilisations in France, contrary to countries such as the United States of America and Great Britain 9,48 . The idiosyncratic nature of vaccine hesitancy and of activists' mobilisations on the subject of vaccination is likely to affect two parameters: a) which vaccines will attract most debate, and b) the overall balance of power between positive and negative discourses.…”

Determinants of vaccine hesitancy in Switzerland: study protocol of a mixed-methods national research programme

“…This technique has major advantages when seeking to examine effects of provider characteristics on patient beliefs and behaviours, particularly for a topic such as vaccine hesitancy where trust between patients and providers has been shown to be a major determinant 32. We also included items in both qualitative interview guides and quantitative questionnaires in order to gauge to what extent patients select physicians they trust or whose practices or attitudes align with their own, a patient practice which has been documented in vaccine hesitancy literature 80. These questions also allow us to assess if disagreements between patients and providers have brought patients to seek care elsewhere in more provider-driven selection processes.…”

On Trusting Neighbors More Than Experts: An Ebola Case Study

“…Again, this is a subject on which there has been considerable science communication, and yet rumors about a causal connection between the MMR vaccine and autism persist (Goldenberg, 2016, p. 553;Kitta and Goldberg, 2017, p. 509). Paumgarten (2019), in his coverage of recent measles cases in a Jewish Orthodox community in New York, notes that information passed through informal community networks was instramental to the vaccine opposition, ultimately resulting in this particular outbreak. In Paumgarten's words:…”

“…People often talk about the anti-vaccination movement as a socialmedia phenomenon, but in the ultra-Orthodox community, where women are discouraged from using computers and smartphones, it has apparently spread mostly among mothers by word of mouth, through phone trees, leaflets, and gatherings: still viral, but analog. "It's more about social networks than social media, " Gellin, of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, said (Paumgarten, 2019).…”