There is an interesting article in the Science section of today’s New York Times about Dr. Heidi Larson, an anthropologist and the founder of the Vaccine Confidence Project in London. Her life’s work involves understanding why people resist vaccination. I was interested because skepticism about vaccination could present a big obstacle to ending the coronavirus pandemic, and also because a good friend of mine — an intelligent, educated, thoughtful mother of three — is one of those who is skeptical about the safety of vaccines.
Like my friend, Dr. Larson disapproves of the term “anti-vaxxers.” And she takes the position that a mistrust of vaccines is not the fault of vaccine skeptics, but rather of those who are responsible for public health and who dismiss skeptics as rumor mongers and conspiracy theorists and do not invest as they should in answering skeptics’ questions and addressing their concerns. “We don’t have a misinformation problem,” Dr. Larson says. “We have a trust problem.”
My friend, for example, recognizes that studies have found that the benefits of individual vaccines outweigh the risks, but she has yet to see studies that prove that the overall childhood vaccination regimen is safe. Children receive multiple vaccinations in their early years; what do we really know, my friend wonders, about the interactions and cumulative effects of all these therapies taken together?
As I see it, vaccine skepticism is at least partly a function of a longstanding dismissive paternalism on the part of many male physicians toward their female patients. Their mindset has been that mothers should do as the doctor tells them because he is the medical expert. She doesn’t deserve to waste his time addressing what he sees as her baseless concerns.
Perhaps the widespread and growing public skepticism about the safety of a future coronavirus vaccine will jolt medical and public health experts out of their smug complacency about vaccine skepticism in general. If they fail to address it effectively, we could see many more deaths from this pandemic than we would otherwise.