Vaccine Hesitancy and Refusal

Vaccine hesitancy, vaccine refusal and the anti-vaccine movement: influence, impact and implications.

Despite being recognized as one of the most successful public health measures, vaccination is perceived as unsafe and unnecessary by a growing number of parents. Anti-vaccination movements have been implicated in lowered vaccine acceptance rates and in the increase in vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks and epidemics. In this review, we will look at determinants of parental decision-making ab...

A systematic review of interventions for reducing parental vaccine refusal and vaccine hesitancy.

Unvaccinated individuals pose a public health threat to communities. Research has identified many factors associated with parental vaccine refusal and hesitancy toward childhood and adolescent immunizations. However, data on the effectiveness of interventions to address parental refusal are limited. We conducted a systematic review of four online databases to identify interventional studies. We...

Vaccine Hesitancy

A Vaccine hesitancy reflects concerns about the decision to vaccinate oneself or one’s children. There is a broad range of factors contributing to vaccine hesitancy, including the compulsory nature of vaccines, their coincidental temporal relationships to adverse health outcomes, unfamiliarity with vaccine-preventable diseases, and lack of trust in corporations and public health agencies. Altho...

Roots of vaccine hesitancy.

Health communication and vaccine hesitancy.

Health communication is an evolving field. There is evidence that communication can be an effective tool, if utilized in a carefully planned and integrated strategy, to influence the behaviours of populations on a number of health issues, including vaccine hesitancy. Experience has shown that key points to take into account in devising and implementing a communication plan include: (i) it is ne...