The Most Effective Way to Get Through to Parents Who Won ’ t Vaccinate Their Kids

This study tells us that parents really value what they hear from other parents who they trust when it comes to decisions about vaccinating their children,” says Marie Heffernan, lead author of the paper and assistant professor in the department of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “The current study was in the context of the COVID-19 vaccine for children, but we can think about this in terms of other routine childhood vaccinations as well.” Not all of the findings were uniform across the sample group. Ethnicity, in particular, made a difference. In the “trusted parent scenario, for example, 61.1% of white parents said they would be very likely to vaccinate their child, compared to 51.6% of Latinx parents and 49.9% of Black parents. Each of the other scenarios saw similarly varying rates by ethnicity. Heffernan was not surprised by those results and believes that history is at least partly to blame. “We know that the historical context of medical research in the U.S. has led to distrust of medical research among communities of color,” she says. “This distrust is justifiable, and it’s important that we in pediatrics, public health, and medicine continue to work to build that trust.” The study does not conclude that pro-vaccine messages from healthcare providers are of no value at all. The relatively high scores among the people who read the “safe and tested” message indicates th...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Vaccines Source Type: news