Vaccines are widely considered by experts to be some of the most important, most effective investments in health, shielding against numerous diseases that would otherwise be deadly or severely disabling. Yet fewer and fewer Americans consider vaccines to be important. A recent Gallup poll found that only 40% of people say it is "extremely important" for parents to vaccinate their kids — a significant drop from 58% in 2019 and 64% in 2001. Another 5% said it was "not very important" and 7% said it is "not important at all."
These sentiments diverge along party lines, with Republican-aligned Americans accounting for the decrease in importance, the July survey reports.
"Until now, Republicans and Democrats generally held similar views of the net risks and benefits associated with vaccines," the authors write. "Today, 31% of Republicans and Republican leaners think vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they are designed to prevent, compared with 5% of Democrats and Democratic leaners. The current figure for Republicans is up from 12% in 2019 and 6% in 2001."
Vaccine messaging during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, including misinformation, seems to have played a role in this growing skepticism.
"The changes in attitudes about childhood vaccines were presaged during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic," the report says. "In 2021, Gallup found far fewer Republican (19%) than Democratic parents (90%) saying they would have a young child of theirs (under age 12) vaccinated for COVID-19 once the vaccine was approved for that age group."
"Now, those doubts appear to be extending to childhood vaccines that have long been used to prevent the spread of contagious diseases, as well as the field of science in general," the authors caution.
A May 2024 study published in the journal Science tracked how vaccine misinformation has proliferated on Facebook, underscoring the importance of fact-checkers. "We estimate that the impact of unflagged content that nonetheless encouraged vaccine skepticism was 46-fold greater than that of misinformation flagged by fact-checkers," the authors wrote. "Our work emphasizes the need to scrutinize factually accurate but potentially misleading content in addition to outright falsehoods."
