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General arguments portraying vaccination as unnecessary, redundant or unimportant
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 claims in general that vaccines (or medicine and doctors) are unnecessary, redundant, or irrelevant. In some cases, it may be that people lack understanding about why the vaccination is needed or a perception that other societal problems are more important, so relative to these problems, vaccines are a lower priority or an unnecessary distraction.
Since most people do not have regular contact with vaccine-preventable diseases, they may not fear these diseases. It is difficult to see how important vaccines actually are if one does not have direct experience of the diseases they prevent. People also do have many competing pressures in their lives, which often taking priority over getting a vaccine. It can feel inconvenient to go and get a vaccine, especially if one faces logistical constraints.
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. It is difficult to see how important vaccines actually are if one does not have direct experience of the diseases they prevent. People also do have many competing pressures in their lives, which often taking priority over getting a vaccine. It can feel inconvenient to go and get a vaccine, especially if one faces logistical constraints.
A vaccine protects you against diseases and severe illness. In the worst case, disease can have fatal consequences and can lead to disability and death.
Prior to the introduction of a vaccine, as recently as 1980, measles caused more than 2.6 million deaths globally. As recently as 2006, approximately 290,000 people worldwide died from tetanus.
To date, vaccinations against polio have saved 19 million people from paralysis and 1.5 million people from death from polio. The number of polio cases worldwide has been reduced by 99.9% compared to the 1980s.
Because of vaccines, people have longer life expectancies. Vaccines help people survive.
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