The alternative fact of “probable vaccine damage”: A typology of vaccination beliefs in 28 European countries

Vulpe, Simona - Nicoleta and Rughinis, Cosima (2021): The alternative fact of “probable vaccine damage”: A typology of vaccination beliefs in 28 European countries.

Abstract

Background: Despite lacking scientific support, vaccine hesitancy is widespread. While “vaccine damage” as a scientific fact is statistically highly uncommon, emerging social and technological forces have converted “probable vaccine damage” into an alternative fact, thus making it a widely shared intersubjective reality.

Methods: Using the Eurobarometer 91.2 survey on a statistically representative EU27-UK sample interviewed in March 2019, we documented perceptions of vaccine risks and identified three belief configurations regarding vaccine effectiveness, safety, and usefulness, through exploratory cluster analysis.

Results: The public beliefs in vaccine risks are frequent. Approximatively one-tenth of the EU27-UK population consider that vaccines are not rigorously tested before authorization, one-third believe that vaccines can overload or weaken the immune system and that they can cause the disease against which they protect, and almost one-half believe that vaccines can cause serious side effects. We identified three belief configurations: the skeptical, the confident, and the trade-off clusters. The skeptical type (approx. 11% of EU27-UK respondents) is defined by the belief that vaccines are rather ineffective, affected by risks of probable vaccine damage, not well-tested, and useless; the confident type (approx. 59%) is defined by beliefs that vaccines are effective, safe, well-tested, and useful; and the trade-off type (approx. 29%) combines beliefs that vaccines are effective, well-tested and useful, with beliefs of probable vaccine damage. The vaccine-confident and the trade-off types profess having similar vaccination histories, indicating the significant role of other factors besides beliefs in inducing behavior.

Conclusions: The high proportion of varying public beliefs in vaccine risks and the presence of a trade-off type of vaccination assessment indicate the social normality of beliefs in probable vaccine damage. Probable vaccine damage presently exists as an alternative fact in the public imagination, perceptively available for wide segments of the public, including those who trust medical science.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Vaccine hesitancy; vaccine damage; typology; Eurobarometer; belief configurations
• Subjects: I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I1 - Health > I12 - Health Behavior

References

[1] World Health Organization, “Ten threats to global health in 2019,” 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/ten-threats-to-global-health-in-2019. [Accessed: 13-Mar-2020].

[2] World Health Organization, “Report on the Sage Working Group on Vaccine Hesitancy,” 2014.

[3] L. A. Kestenbaum and K. A. Feemster, “Identifying and Addressing Vaccine Hesitancy,” Pediatr. Ann., vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 71–75, 2015.

[4] P. McDonald et al., “Exploring California’s new law eliminating personal belief exemptions to childhood vaccines and vaccine decision-making among homeschooling mothers in California,” Vaccine, vol. 37, no. 5, pp. 742–750, 2019.

[5] S. Riedel, “Edward Jenner and the History of Smallpox and Vaccination,” Baylor Univ. Med. Cent. Proc., vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 21–25, Jan. 2005.

[6] E. Dubé, M. Vivion, and N. E. MacDonald, “Vaccine hesitancy, vaccine refusal and the anti-vaccine movement: Influence, impact and implications,” Expert Rev. Vaccines, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 99–117, 2014.

[7] P. Hobson-West, “Understanding vaccination resistance: moving beyond risk,” Health. Risk Soc., vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 273–283, 2003.

[8] G. A. Poland and R. M. Jacobson, “Poland, G. A., & Jacobson, R. M. (2001). Understanding those who do not understand: a brief review of the anti-vaccine movement. Vaccine, 19(17), 2440-2445,” Vaccine, vol. 19, no. 17, pp. 2440–2445, 2001.

[9] A. Hadjipanayis et al., “Vaccine confidence among parents: Large scale study in eighteen European countries,” Vaccine, vol. 38, no. 6, pp. 1505–1512, Feb. 2020.

[10] C. Sanders and K. Burnett, “The neoliberal roots of modern vaccine hesitancy,” J. Heal. Soc. Sci., vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 149–156, 2019.

[11] J. A. Reich, “Neoliberal Mothering and Vaccine Refusal: Imagined Gated Communities and the Privilege of Choice,” Gend. Soc., vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 679–704, 2014.

[12] E. J. Sobo, A. Huhn, A. Sannwald, and L. Thurman, “Information Curation among Vaccine Cautious Parents: Web 2.0, Pinterest Thinking, and Pediatric Vaccination Choice,” Med. Anthropol. Cross Cult. Stud. Heal. Illn., vol. 35, no. 6, pp. 529–546, Nov. 2016.

[13] S. Blume, “Anti-vaccination movements and their interpretations,” Soc. Sci. Med., vol. 62, no. 3, pp. 628–642, 2006.

[14] E. Dubé, C. Laberge, M. Guay, P. Bramadat, R. Roy, and J. Bettinger, “Vaccine hesitancy An overview,” Hum. Vaccin. Immunother., vol. 9, no. 8, pp. 1763–1773, 2013.

[15] C. Betsch, F. Renkewitz, T. Betsch, and C. Ulshöfer, “The influence of vaccine-critical websites on perceiving vaccination risks.,” J. Health Psychol., vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 446–55, Apr. 2010.

[16] R. Z. Zimmerman et al., “Vaccine Criticism on the World Wide Web,” J. Med. Internet Res., vol. 7, no. 2, p. e17, 2005.

[17] J. P. Baker, “Mercury, Vaccines, and Autism One Controversy, Three Histories,” Public Heal. Then Now, vol. 98, no. 2, pp. 244–253, 2008.

[18] E. Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2014.

[19] J. S. Gerber and P. A. Offit, “Vaccines and Autism: A Tale of Shifting Hypotheses,” Clin. Infect. Dis., vol. 48, no. 4, pp. 456–461, 2009.

[20] C. Toth, “The rational, loving and responsible parent. A discursive construction of the identities of the parents that decided not to vaccinate their children,” J. Comp. Res. Anthropol. Sociol., vol. 10, no. 2, 2019.

[21] A. Kata, “A postmodern Pandora’s box: Anti-vaccination misinformation on the Internet,” Vaccine, vol. 28, pp. 1709–1716, 2010.

[22] M. J. Hornsey, E. A. Harris, and K. S. Fielding, “The Psychological Roots of Anti-Vaccination Attitudes: A 24-Nation Investigation,” Heal. Psychol., vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 307–315, 2018.

[23] R. Gasparini, D. Panatto, P. L. Lai, and D. Amicizia, “The ‘urban myth’ of the association between neurological disorders and vaccinations,” Journal of Preventive Medicine and Hygiene, vol. 56, no. 1. Pacini Editore S.p.A., pp. E1–E8, 2015.

[24] C. M. Poland and G. A. Poland, “Vaccine education spectrum disorder: the importance of incorporating psychological and cognitive models into vaccine education,” Vaccine, vol. 29, no. 37, pp. 6145–6148, 2011.

[25] M. Navin, “Competing Epistemic Spaces,” Soc. Theory Pract., vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 241–264, May 2013.

[26] D. Numerato, L. Vochocová, V. Štětka, and A. Macková, “The vaccination debate in the ‘post‐truth’ era: social media as sites of multi‐layered reflexivity,” Sociol. Health Illn., vol. 41, no. S1, pp. 82–97, Oct. 2019.

[27] K. Attwell, D. T. Smith, and P. R. Ward, “‘The Unhealthy Other’: How vaccine rejecting parents construct the vaccinating mainstream,” Vaccine, vol. 36, no. 12, pp. 1621–1626, 2018.

[28] C. Doty, “Misinformation on the Internet?: A Study of Vaccine Safety Beliefs,” UCLA, 2015.

[29] J. Leask, S. Chapman, and S. C. Cooper Robbins, “‘All manner of ills’: The features of serious diseases attributed to vaccination,” Vaccine, vol. 28, no. 17, pp. 3066–3070, Apr. 2010.

[30] C. Doty, “Social Epistemology and Cognitive Authority in Online Comments about Vaccine Safety,” in iConference 2015 Proceedings, 2015.

[31] N. Smith and T. Graham, “Mapping the anti-vaccination movement on Facebook,” Inf. Commun. Soc., vol. 22, no. 9, pp. 1310–1327, Jul. 2019.

[32] M. E. Díaz Crescitelli et al., “A meta-synthesis study of the key elements involved in childhood vaccine hesitancy,” Public Health, vol. 180, pp. 38–45, 2020.

[33] C. Gidengil, C. Chen, A. M. Parker, S. Nowak, and L. Matthews, “Beliefs around childhood vaccines in the United States: A systematic review,” Vaccine, vol. 37, no. 45. Elsevier Ltd, pp. 6793–6802, Oct-2019.

[34] R. Casiday, “Risk and trust in vaccine decision making,” Durham Anthropol. J., vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2005.

[35] P. Żuk, P. Żuk, and J. Lisiewicz-Jakubaszko, “The anti-vaccine movement in Poland: The socio-cultural conditions of the opposition to vaccination and threats to public health,” Vaccine, vol. 37, no. 11, pp. 1491–1494, Mar. 2019.

[36] H. J. Larson et al., “The State of Vaccine Confidence 2016: Global Insights Through a 67-Country Survey,” EBioMedicine, vol. 12, pp. 295–301, 2016.

[37] A. Kennedy, K. LaVail, G. Nowak, M. Basket, and S. Landry, “Confidence about vaccines in the United States: Understanding parents’ perceptions,” Health Aff., vol. 30, no. 6, pp. 1151–1159, Jun. 2011.

[38] P. Stefanoff et al., “Tracking parental attitudes on vaccination across European countries: The Vaccine Safety, Attitudes, Training and Communication Project (VACSATC),” Vaccine, vol. 28, pp. 5731–5737, 2010.

[39] A. Zingg and M. Siegrist, “Measuring people’s knowledge about vaccination: Developing a one-dimensional scale,” Vaccine, vol. 30, no. 25, pp. 3771–3777, May 2012.

[40] A. Bocquier et al., “Social differentiation of vaccine hesitancy among French parents and the mediating role of trust and commitment to health: A nationwide cross-sectional study,” Vaccine, vol. 36, no. 50, pp. 7666–7673, 2018.

[41] M. Y. K. Chow, M. Dankin, H. W. Willaby, S. Pemberton, and J. Leask, “Parental attitudes, beliefs, behaviours and concerns towards childhood vaccinations in Australia: A national online survey,” Aust. Fam. Physician, vol. 46, no. 3, 2017.

[42] F. Napolitano, A. D’Alessandro, and I. F. Angelillo, “Investigating Italian parents’ vaccine hesitancy: A cross-sectional survey,” Hum. Vaccin. Immunother., vol. 14, no. 7, pp. 1558–1565, Jul. 2018.

[43] M. LaCour and T. Davis, “Vaccine skepticism reflects basic cognitive differences in mortality-related event frequency estimation,” Vaccine, Mar. 2020.

[44] M. T. Keane et al., “Confidence in vaccination: a parent model,” Vaccine, vol. 23, no. 19, pp. 2486–2493, 2005.

[45] N. A. Constantine and P. Jerman, “Acceptance of Human Papillomavirus Vaccination among Californian Parents of Daughters: A Representative Statewide Analysis,” J. Adolesc. Heal., vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 108–115, 2007.

[46] S. Ramanadhan, E. Galarce, Z. Xuan, J. Alexander-Molloy, and K. Viswanath, “Addressing the Vaccine Hesitancy Continuum: An Audience Segmentation Analysis of American Adults Who Did Not Receive the 2009 H1N1 Vaccine,” Vaccines, vol. 3, pp. 556–578, 2015.

[47] I. Rossen, M. J. Hurlstone, P. D. Dunlop, and C. Lawrence, “‘Accepters’, ‘fence sitters’, and ‘rejecters’,” Soc. Sci. Med., vol. 224, pp. 23–27, 2019.

[48] European Commission, “Eurobarometer 91.2,” Kantar Public, GESIS Data Archive, Cologne, 2019.

[49] S. I. Strong, “Alternative facts and the post-truth society: Meeting the challenge,” U. Pa. L. Rev. Online, vol. 165, pp. 137–146, 2017.

[50] J. Luyten, L. Bruyneel, and A. J. van Hoek, “Assessing vaccine hesitancy in the UK population using a generalized vaccine hesitancy survey instrument,” Vaccine, vol. 37, pp. 2494–2501, 2019.