From Parents’ Vaccine Refusal to COVID Vaccines: Understanding Vaccine Hesitancy, Community Health, and Trust

Healthcare decisions are deeply personal. Yet infectious disease reveals how our personal choices inevitably affect others. Drawing on her award-winning book on why parents reject vaccines for their children, sociologist Jennifer Reich examines how parents make decisions about their children’s health generally and vaccines specifically. Using in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations collected over a decade, Dr. Reich looks at how parents who opt out of vaccines weigh risk and benefit, evaluate scientific claims, strategize how to promote their children’s health without vaccines, and reframe this public health intervention as a series of individual choices they are uniquely qualified to make. Building on this work, Dr. Reich examines how vaccines against the novel coronavirus responsible for the covid-19 pandemic is presenting new questions about vaccine hesitancy and trust. This talk concludes by considering why vaccines work best when used by a critical mass of people and how we balance personal liberty and community responsibility.

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