Vaccine hesitancy is as old as vaccines themselves, the first of which was the smallpox vaccine, developed in 1796. What’s new, however, is the rapidly growing distrust of not just vaccines but the people and organizations that recommend them. Today, public health itself is in crisis.
In a piece published by JAMA last year, researchers from Harvard wrote that the pandemic “accelerated a shift in the public’s perception of the field of public health away from its historic reputation as a fact-based, science-centered discipline toward a politicized field whose role is defined very differently by those in each political party.” Regardless of party, though, Americans overall say that their trust in medical scientists is declining. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that only 29% of adults in the United States said they had “a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the best interests of the public,” down from 35% who had said this pre-pandemic in January 2019.
The rising resistance to vaccines in the U.S. is emblematic of Americans’ faltering trust in the medical establishment, government agencies, and the public health measures they espouse...
The groups spreading disinformation have also developed a level of sophistication that has eluded public health officials. Another study done by Jamison and led by David A. Broniatowski, Ph.D., associate director of the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics at George Washington University, evaluated vaccine-related Facebook ads in 2018 and 2019. Researchers found that over half the anti-vaccine ads were funded by just two anti-vaccine groups: Children’s Health Defense (previously called the World Mercury Project), founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Stop Mandatory Vaccination, founded by anti-vaccine activist Larry Cook. “They tended to target women who were in their 30s, or basically parent age,” says Broniatowski. And their tactics worked. In fact, a Facebook ad was the first thing to hook Simpson into the anti-vax movement.
Read the article in Prevention.