How measuring vaccine hesitancy could help health professionals tackle it

Theirs is not the first vaccine hesitancy scale out there—similar questionnaires have been developed by others, often focusing on parents’ feelings about their children’s vaccinations. But Kantor says this is the first to incorporate the theme of deliberation—a concept that seems to have become more popular during the early days of covid-19 vaccination rollouts.

Nicole Vike at the University of Cincinnati and her colleagues are taking a different approach. They say research has suggested that how people feel about risks and rewards seems to influence whether they get vaccinated (although not necessarily in a simple or direct manner).

Vike’s team surveyed over 4,000 people to better understand this link, asking them information about themselves and how they felt about a series of pictures of sports, nature scenes, cute and aggressive animals, and so on. Using machine learning, they built a model that could predict, from these results, whether a person would be likely to get vaccinated against covid-19.

This survey could be easily distributed to thousands of people and is subtle enough that people taking it might not realize it is gathering information about their vaccine choices, Vike and her colleagues wrote in a paper describing their research. And the information collected could help public health centers understand where there is demand for vaccines, and conversely, where outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases might be more likely.

Models like these could be helpful in combating vaccine hesitancy, says Ashlesha Kaushik, vice president of the Iowa Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. The information could enable health agencies to deliver tailored information and support to specific communities that share similar concerns, she says.

Kantor, who is a practicing physician, hopes his questionnaire could offer doctors and other health professionals insight into their patients’ concerns and suggest ways to address them. It isn’t always practical for doctors to sit down with their patients for lengthy, in-depth discussions about the merits and shortfalls of vaccines. But if a patient can spend a few minutes filling out a questionnaire before the appointment, the doctor will have a starting point for steering a respectful and fruitful conversation about the subject.

When it comes to vaccine hesitancy, we need all the insight we can get. Vaccines prevent millions of deaths every year. One and half million children under the age of five die every year from vaccine-preventable diseases, according to the children’s charity UNICEF. In 2019, the World Health Organization included “vaccine hesitancy” on its list of 10 threats to global health.