Talk:Vaccine hesitancy

The leading photograph shows an anti-vaccination activist wearing a poster that says, "Kids have a 99.99% Survival rate with natural immunity." The label says, "An anti-vaccination person wearing a false claim that children can be effectively protected from disease solely by natural immunity"

I have two problems with this. The first is that the poster does not use the word solely. That was made up by a Wiki-editor. The second is the word false. Whether the poster is stupid or whether the wearer was trying to put across a false message is beside the point. If you are going to say a message is false you need to have reliable citation that the actual message is false. No such citation exists because the poster is not false. The mortality rate of the common cold, for example, when left to a child's natural immunity, is less than 0.01%. The same applies to most childhood medical problems. (These are actually cuts and other wounds that could be treated with an anti-tetanus jab.) The entire article states very clearly (and has reliable references) that an anti-vaccination stance is wrong on many levels. There is no need to add propaganda. OrewaTel (talk) 19:51, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

• It's false. The data from just one disease proves it wrong [https://www.cdc.gov/measles/downloads/measlesdataandstatsslideset.pdf CDC measles data] without even considering everything else that vaccines have been produced for. Black Kite (talk) 20:02, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

:Well maybe we should get rid of that picture. If you make any claim VAGUE enough, it can be true, like that one...who knows what disease that guy is referring to...rickets? ---Avatar317^(talk) 00:59, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

The photograph was taken at a protest in Leicester, England in October 2021 for the movement "Against Vaccine Passports UK". The man in the photo is wearing a T-shirt with the letters "AGAINST VACCINE PASSPORTS .COM". Though the domain name has been taken over, [https://web.archive.org/web/20211130175230/http://againstvaccinepassports.com/ here is an archived version of the website].

The poster relates directly to Vaccine passports during the COVID-19 pandemic which has a section for "Arguments and controversy § Natural immunity".

What I'm saying is that the poster most definitely was about vaccine hesitancy (during Covid, in particular), and not simply about natural immunity of ALL childhood diseases (such as colds). I'm pretty sure the anti-vaxxers were using the 99.99% figure (compiled pre-Covid) to forward their message of "I don't want to get a Covid vaccine and damn sure don't want a vaccine passport to hinder my travelling". Grorp (talk) 02:35, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

:If you are going to take a single disease then make it smallpox that has a very high mortality rate. (Measles tends to be survivable.) But the point is that the vast majority of childhood illnesses are not fatal. I would like to replace the caption by, "An imbecile wearing a particularly stupid notice" but that would not be encyclopaedic language. I've replaced the word false by misleading as being more accurate. OrewaTel (talk) 22:56, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

I cannot edit the article at this time. I wanted to add a section to safety concerns about adverse effects in vaccines. I have several examples which are specifically linked to vaccine hesitancy. The Dengue Fever vaccine case in the Philipines which resulted in increased complications from infection: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/05/03/719037789/botched-vaccine-launch-has-deadly-repercussions

As well as Polio vaccine rollouts in Africa which caused Polio cases:

https://www.science.org/content/article/first-polio-cases-linked-new-oral-vaccine-detected-africa Puerto de Nile (talk) 01:30, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

:These are interesting articles but they do not show that these vaccines are the cause of vaccine hesitancy. Whilst this information may be useful in the Vaccination article, it does not belong here. OrewaTel (talk) 06:59, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

:: Though in the latter Polio article, the reason why an improved vaccine caused an issue was ironically because not many of the population had taken up the vaccine. Black Kite (talk) 10:46, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

::::::Perhaps we could add a section that points out that vaccine hesitancy leaves the unvaccinated vulnerable to disease through vaccine shedding. This, however, is an unusual situation. The normal Covid vaccine, for example, cannot shed viruses that have the ability to infect. Nevertheless if there are enough documented cases where vaccine hesitancy put people at risk because of an immunisation programme then we should note the fact.

:::OrewaTel (talk) 00:46, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

:Here is the quote in the NPR article relating to vaccine hesitancy:

:Since the Dengvaxia controversy, the confidence in vaccines among Philippine parents has plummeted from 82% in 2015 to only 21% in 2018, a recent study found. Over that same time span, the proportion of parents who strongly believe vaccines are important has fallen from 93% to 32%.

:As result, vaccine coverage for childhood diseases in the Philippines, such as the measles, has dropped, WHO says. And the Philippines is now facing a large measles outbreak, with more than 26,000 cases and more than 355 deaths during 2019.

:More generally, for this article I don't understand why vaccine complications are not addressed more substantially as a source of vaccine hesitancy Puerto de Nile (talk) 03:31, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

:This article has a section on the covid-19 vaccine itself but only very briefly touches on how the pandemic may have shifted attitudes toward routine vaccination. I would like to use peer reviewed scientific reviews to add information about how the pandemic has influenced vaccine hesitancy and changed vaccine trends. There are news articles references in a lot of the content related to Covid-19 but I believe this page could benefit from peer reviewed scientific research. Knarnk (talk) 18:17, 28 February 2025 (UTC)

Recently had a paragraph removed by @Black Kite because I cited a book that is anti-medical establishment; however the book represents the vaccine hesitant view, so I thought it should be included.

---

It has been claimed that vaccine manufacturers design clinical trials in a way to intentionally obscure the adverse effects of a vaccine, by comparing the safety of a new vaccine to older vaccines rather than a "true" placebo (such as saline). However this is common practice when a proven effective treatment exists, as it would be unethical to deprive trial participants (in this case children) from beneficial treatment.

--- Diligent researcher (talk) 22:13, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

:It's not our task to judge if that's true or false. If you want to suggest edits, you have to WP:CITE WP:MEDRS to that extent. tgeorgescu (talk) 14:07, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

:Who is the author, and where was it published? Slatersteven (talk) 14:12, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

::The book is called "Turtles all the way down: vaccine science and myth" ([https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Turtles_All_the_Way_Down.html?id=8J5ZzwEACAAJ&redir_esc=y ISBN: 9789655981049]), author is anonymous, published by "Turtles Team" in 2022. Diligent researcher (talk) 14:19, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

:::So it is not in fact a peer-reviewed study? Slatersteven (talk) 14:23, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

::::No, it's a book. The issue is that it's making an important claim that seems to be vaccine hesitant. That's why I thought it should be included. Other claims on this page are supported by news articles, for example. Diligent researcher (talk) 14:41, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::But it would not be an RS for medical matters, so at best it could be presented as a claim made by, no one as it is anonymous, so can't even be attributed as an opinion. So it fails wp:undue. Slatersteven (talk) 14:45, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::: And looking at some of its claims, it seems to be very anti-Big-Pharma in its tone. Some of the Amazon reviews are spectacular. Black Kite (talk) 15:57, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::Brian Martin wrote a review of the book ([https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365008016_A_message_from_the_Turtles A message from the turtles]). Could that be incorporated into the page in some way? Diligent researcher (talk) 16:38, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::: Um, no. Martin has published a lot of nonsense regarding vaccines, mostly around the subject of vaccines "causing AIDS/HIV". Black Kite (talk) 19:19, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

• Sorry, but why in Hell are we even discussing using some well-known antivaxx book[https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/part-1-10-the-grand-debunk-of-the-antivaxxer-book-turtles-all-the-way-down/] for sourcing on this page? Bon courage (talk) 17:52, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

:*The Turtles book cites a WP:MEDRS for its claim. So, in theory, that MEDRS could get cited in our article. The problem is that that MEDRS does not support the claim made by the Turtles book—it got misinterpreted. Meaning {{tqred|in a way to intentionally obscure the adverse effects of a vaccine}} is a misinterpretation of the MEDRS. tgeorgescu (talk) 18:21, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Found some more sources, which I added to the article.{{cite web |last1=Urgun |first1=Kamran |last2=Mathur |first2=Gagan |title=Post-COVID-19 Blood Supply Challenges: Requests for Blood from… |url=https://www.cap.org/member-resources/articles/post-covid-19-blood-supply-challenges-requests-for-blood-from-unvaccinated-donors |publisher=College of American Pathologists |access-date=29 March 2025 |language=en-us |date=30 October 2024}}{{cite journal |last1=Jacobs |first1=Jeremy W. |last2=Bibb |first2=Lorin A. |last3=Savani |first3=Bipin N. |last4=Booth |first4=Garrett S. |title=Refusing blood transfusions from COVID-19-vaccinated donors: are we repeating history? |journal=British Journal of Haematology |date=2022 |volume=196 |issue=3 |pages=585–588 |doi=10.1111/bjh.17842 |url=https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjh.17842 |language=en |issn=1365-2141}}{{cite web |last1=Aleccia |first1=JoNel |title=‘Tainted’ Blood: Covid Skeptics Request Blood Transfusions From Unvaccinated Donors |url=https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/tainted-blood-covid-skeptics-request-blood-transfusions-from-unvaccinated-donors/ |publisher=KFF |access-date=29 March 2025 |date=17 August 2021}} For the interested.

{{reftalk}} Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:03, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

:I think I know the answer, but for what do you wish to use them? Slatersteven (talk) 10:09, 20 April 2025 (UTC)

The current wording of the introduction of the article implies that there is a general scientific consensus that any vaccine that has been approved for use by any government is useful rather than harmful and that any delay in accepting it or refusal to accept it is harmful for public health, any that any such behaviour can therefore be considered as instance of the same type of antiscientific behaviour named "vaccine hesitancy". The article thereby fails to take into account the basic fact that any new vaccine has to be tested both for its efficiency in disease prevention and for potentially harmful effects, that such tests may in some cases have ambiguous results and that governments, in approving new vaccines for use, may in some cases act before the necessary tests have been completed or fail to take into account all extant evidence, either by error or by intent. To believe the contraty would mean to imply that governments are both always infallible and never evil minded. Such a belief should be in itself considered antiscientific by any standard of political and social sciences. Therefore, in the introduction to "vaccine hesitancy", there should at least be a distinction between the refusal to take vaccines that are considered to be useful by a general scientific consensus developed over a longer time of experience without adducing any new scientific evidence, and the refusal to take a newly developed vaccine recently approved by some government based on the personal belief that the vaccine has been approved without the necessary precaution and that additional testing should be done before accepting it, and even more the case of vaccines that have been approved in some countries but not in others or that are the subject of a current still unresolved scientific controversy. In the latter cases, rather than unscientic beliefs, the delay or refusal to take a vaccine may simply be based on mistrust to the incumbent government and its dependent agencies. Such mistrust is widespread in countries that have in recent times experienced either totalitarian dictatorship or foreign colonial rule, and it is not baseless, as auch regimes are known to also have misused public health measures for purposes harmful to the population. 2A02:3032:61:E783:BEE7:3F84:CE33:8095 (talk) 05:19, 20 April 2025 (UTC)