University of Idaho Assistant Professor Florian Justwan found in a recent study people are more willing to get vaccinated if they live close to a concerning outbreak — regardless of typical beliefs.
Justwan began work with Associate Professor Bert Baumgaertner and University of Utah Associate Professor Juliet Carlisle along with two former undergraduate students, Emma Carson and Jordan Kizer in 2017.
“What we’re interested in, in this paper, is we’re trying to explain people’s attitudes towards measles vaccinations,” Justwan said. “So, in other words, we’re telling people, ‘Hey, imagine that you’re mixing the vaccine for measles. How likely would you be to get vaccinated if that was the case?’ And then we notice that people give very different responses to this.”
Assistant Professors Ben Ridenhour and Craig Miller have also worked with Justwan, Baumgaertner and Carlisle. Justwan began working with them in 2016 but said the rest of the professors may have been researching vaccine skepticism through UI’s Center for Modeling Complex Interactions before then.
“These are the people that have a very large research agenda,” Justwan said. “They’re trying to understand how social dynamics affect infectious disease outbreaks in the United States.”
Ridenhour said Justwan’s team hired a survey company to gather their data set. The team surveyed people from across the U.S. about how likely they would be to get vaccinated in several different scenarios. They discovered that while trust in government medical experts had a major impact on the survey participants’ willingness to be vaccinated, proximity to a disease outbreak could override their unwillingness to be vaccinated.
“The idea here is that if you distrust the medical establishment in the United States, so these are institutions such as the CDC, for example, then your attitudes towards vaccines depend to a considerable degree on whether or not you live close to an actual risk area,” Justwan said.
Read ‘UI continues vaccine attitude research’
Baumgaertner, Carlisle, Justwan, Ridenhour and Miller have also found that political beliefs, income and severity of the disease also had an impact on whether people would be willing to get vaccinated.
Justwan said people who distrust government medical experts tend to distrust the value of vaccines as well. Ridenhour added that these people tend to hold extreme political beliefs, right leaning or left leaning, while those with more trust in the government tend to hold moderate political beliefs.
“‘Why don’t people go get vaccinated?’ It’s an important question for public health and understanding why we’re failing to control some of these diseases,” Ridenhour said. “It’s interesting. It has a lot of relevance to everybody. Nobody wants to get the flu, nobody wants to get the measles, right?”
Justwan said he hopes this research helps foster trust in the medical establishment. Ridenhour said this could improve public health through helping improve herd immunity, which protects the community as well as the individuals vaccinated.
“The first thing that we always say, people, get vaccinated,” Justwan said. “That should always be the key takeaway from any study focused on vaccine skepticism. Vaccine skepticism in that form is unfounded.”
Lex Miller can be reached at [email protected]