Experts generally consider vaccines to be among the most important and effective health investments, because they protect against many diseases that would otherwise be fatal or seriously debilitating. Yet fewer and fewer Americans consider vaccines important. A recent Gallup poll found that only 40% of respondents say it is “extremely important” for parents to vaccinate their children, down significantly from 58% in 2019 and 64% in 2001. Five percent said it was “not very important,” and 7% said it was “not important at all.”
These sentiments diverge across political parties, with Americans close to the Republican Party responsible for the decline in the importance of these sentiments, according to the July survey.
“Until now, Republicans and Democrats have generally held similar views about the net risks and benefits associated with vaccines,” the authors write. “Today, 31% of Republicans and Republican-leaning Republicans believe vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they are designed to prevent, compared with 5% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning Democrats. The current figure for Republicans is up from 12% in 2019 and 6% in 2001.”
Vaccine messages spread during the COVID-19 pandemic, including misinformation, appear to have played a role in this growing skepticism.
“The shifts in attitudes toward childhood vaccines were foreshadowed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the report said. “In 2021, Gallup found that significantly fewer Republican parents (19%) than Democratic parents (90%) said they would vaccinate one of their young children (under age 12) against COVID-19 once a vaccine was approved for that age group.”
“Today, these doubts seem to extend to childhood vaccines that have long been used to prevent the spread of contagious diseases, as well as to science in general,” the authors warn.
A May 2024 study published in the journal Science tracked the proliferation of vaccine misinformation on Facebook, highlighting the importance of fact-checkers. “We estimate that the impact of unflagged content that nonetheless promotes vaccine skepticism is 46 times greater than that of misinformation flagged by fact-checkers,” the authors wrote. “Our work underscores the need to carefully scrutinize factually accurate but potentially misleading content in addition to outright falsehoods.”
