New evidence on antiscience: Parents’ vaccine-advice rejections quantified

If it’s true that vaccine skepticism, a public health concern, matters also for the physical sciences because it’s founded in antiscience, and if it’s true that antiscience matters generally, then it may merit physical scientists’ attention that the journal Pediatrics has just published the article “Alternative vaccination schedule preferences among parents of young children.”

The 3 October Washington Post contains a wire-service story about it under the headline “More than 1 in 10 US parents reject vaccine advice for young children; many question safety .” The story reports that the study’s lead author “said vaccine skepticism is fueled by erroneous information online and media reports that sensationalize misconceptions” and that these “include the persistent belief among some parents about an autism-vaccine link despite scientific evidence to the contrary and the debunking of one of the most publicized studies that first fueled vaccine fears years ago.” The Post article adds, “Some parents also dismiss the severity of vaccine-preventable diseases because they’ve never seen a child seriously ill with those illnesses.”

The Pediatrics abstract begins, “Objective: Increasing numbers of parents use alternative vaccination schedules that differ from the recommended childhood vaccination schedule for their children. We sought to describe national patterns of alternative vaccination schedule use and the potential ‘malleability’ of parents’ current vaccination schedule choices.” It ends, “Conclusions: More than 1 of 10 parents of young children currently use an alternative vaccination schedule. In addition, a large proportion of parents currently following the recommended schedule seem to be ‘at risk’ for switching to an alternative schedule.”

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are published in ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.