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Dismissal of the risk of getting the disease, considering its incidence to be irrelevant
People often have a distorted perception of the risk that they or others face from a disease. Specifically, people may perceive that the risk from a disease is low or inconsequential. This can motivate their belief that they don’t need a vaccine or that the drawbacks outweigh the benefits of vaccination. A misperception of disease risk has been found to be related to hesitant attitudes towards vaccination.
One of the reasons that people underestimate the risk from diseases is that vaccines have been so successful. It’s easy to misperceive that the risk from a preventable disease is low when few people, if any, suffer from that disease.
This theme dismisses the risk of being infected with the disease (as opposed to the severity of the disease). In extreme cases, the disease is considered to be non-existent or irrelevant to a person’s life context.
Since most people do not have regular contact with vaccine-preventable diseases, they may not fear these diseases. In countries like the UK, vaccines have had great success in lowering the incidence of some diseases that were highly threatening several decades ago, like measles. It can be difficult to see how important vaccines actually are if one does not have direct experience of the diseases they prevent.
Dialogue between patients and healthcare professionals is most productive if it is guided by empathy, and an opportunity for the patient to affirm the reasons underlying their attitudes and to express understanding for that. That’s why it is important to understand the attitude roots behind people’s overt opinions. To affirm a person’s underlying attitude root does not mean we need to agree with the specifics of their argument. For example, we can acknowledge that:
Since most people do not have regular contact with vaccine-preventable diseases, they may not fear these diseases. In countries like the UK, vaccines have had great success in lowering the incidence of some diseases that were highly threatening several decades ago, like measles. It can be difficult to see how important vaccines actually are if one does not have direct experience of the diseases they prevent.
We shouldn’t underestimate the risk of contracting a vaccine-preventable disease. Without vaccines, these diseases can be life-threatening. In our increasingly connected world, infectious diseases can cross borders and oceans and easily infect anyone who is not vaccinated.
Even for diseases that were under control, there have been recent outbreaks because people stopped vaccinating against them, thinking they were irrelevant. For example, in 2019, many communities in the US faced large measles outbreaks when the vaccination rate had dropped.
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