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Common Vaccine Hesitancy Issues

Address facts with fast facts and key messages

You’ve asked permission to share with a vaccine hesitant person, and they want to hear what you have to say about their concerns. Here are some facts you might be able to use to frame risk perception and other concerns around vaccines and diseases.

Fast facts

Key messages

  • More than 100 years of research tells us that vaccines are very safe. They are so safe that, on average, there will be only one serious adverse event for every one million doses of vaccine.
  • Disease-related deaths and disabilities have decreased significantly when vaccines are introduced.
  • It’s important to get your safety information from credible sources who have no financial gain in supporting or opposing vaccines.

Debunking Disinformation

get our app to debunk vaccine misinformation

It can be a challenge to debunk disinformation but we’ve got an app for that.

Simply download our debunking tool from the Apple Store or Google Play to help you get credible information to people with vaccine questions.

And sign up for Just the Facts: Correcting This Week’s Misinformation where we take a look at and debunk false or misleading claims you might have seen on social media each week.

Expertise is NOT a four letter word

We’re in a strange space where we both distrust experts and believe we can all be experts through a Google search. No wonder we’re all a bit confused.

It’s time to sing the praises of the expert again. For those of us who are not car mechanics, we can’t expect to fix a transmission based on some Google searches.

Same with science. Scientists spend years learning how to rigorously conduct scientific work. And more years after that, honing their expertise about a specific area. We’re just never going to know as much as them.

And that’s ok.

A lot of people read journal articles and think they’ve learned all they need to know. But the danger is not fully understanding all the nuances. Scientists understand things like how a p-value can impact the strength of the findings.

They know how to evaluate different study designs when reading the literature. And understand if a sample size is appropriate for the study objective. Most of us don’t know this.

And expertise is a very specific thing. There is no expert of all things. Expertise takes so long to cultivate that people are only truly experts in one or two things. So your fabulous cardiologist is probably not a vaccine expert. And an immunologist probably isn’t the best choice to learn about mental health.

That’s why expertise matters. Let’s get back to listening to our mechanic for car trouble, our chiropractor for back issues, and our vaccine expert for vaccines.

Download this Toolkit

Download and print or share a copy of the Vaccine Hesitancy toolkit with your community.

Download the PDF

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