Review and Feature Article
Vaccine Hesitancy: Drivers and How the Allergy Community Can Help

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaip.2021.06.035Get rights and content

Vaccine hesitancy—defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a “delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccination services”—is not a recent phenomenon. Historical records indicate that vaccine hesitancy existed by the 18th century in Europe and even resulted in violent riots. The drivers of vaccine hesitancy have evolved over the last 200 years but not, perhaps, as much as one might expect. More problematic are the means by which concerns over vaccine hesitancy are communicated by a new landscape of digital communication, generating what has been described as an “infodemic” in which an overabundance of information—both factual and misinformation—contributes to hesitancy. In this review, we discuss the background and current drivers of vaccine hesitancy and the evidence base for strategies to combat this. We highlight the important role the allergy/immunology community could have in working to mitigate vaccine hesitancy, particularly with respect to the current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

Key words

Anaphylaxis
COVID-19
Vaccination
Vaccine refusal
Vaccine hesitancy

Abbreviations used

aP
Acellular pertussis vaccine
COVID-19
Current coronavirus disease 2019
HPV
Human papillomavirus
MMR
Measles-mumps-rubella
WHO
World Health Organization
wP
Whole cell pertussis vaccine

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No funding has been received for this study.

Conflicts of interest: P. J. Turner is supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre based at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Imperial College London; has provided expertise to the U.K.‘s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) without remuneration; has an honorary contract with Public Health England; and further reports personal fees from Aimmune Therapeutics, DBV Technologies, Allergenis, UK Food Standards Agency and ILSI Europe; grants from NIHR/Imperial BRC, UK Medical Research Council, UK Food Standards Agency, End Allergies Together, and Jon Moulton Charity Trust, outside the submitted work. H. Larson reports grants and personal fees from GSK, grants from Johnson & Johnson, and grants and other from Merck, outside the submitted work. The rest of the authors declare that they have no relevant conflicts of interest.

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