The following essay is reproduced with permission. 
The Conversation is an online publication covering the latest research.
Why would a mother refuse a safe and potentially life-saving vaccine for her child?
Popular texts on vaccine skepticism often condemn white and middle-class mothers who refuse some or all recommended vaccines as hysterical, misinformed, overzealous and ignorant. Mainstream media and health care providers are increasingly dismissing vaccine refusal as a characteristic of fringe American ideology, far-right radicalization, or anti-intellectualism.
About supporting science journalism
If you enjoyed this article, please consider supporting our award-winning journalism. Currently subscribing. By subscribing, you help ensure future generations of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas that shape the world today.
But vaccine skepticism, and the widespread medical mistrust and widespread anxiety it reflects, is more than just a fringe position.
Childhood vaccination rates were already in steep decline before the COVID-19 pandemic, and 2019 saw a resurgence of measles, mumps, and chickenpox in the United States. Four years into the pandemic, more Americans are questioning the safety, effectiveness and necessity of vaccines. Regular vaccines. Childhood vaccination rates have fallen sharply across the United States, with public health officials blaming a “spillover” effect from pandemic-related vaccine skepticism for the recent measles outbreak. In a 2023 survey by Pew Research, nearly half of American mothers rated their risk of side effects from the MMR vaccine as medium or high.
Recommended vaccines have undergone rigorous testing and evaluation, and the most notorious charges regarding vaccine-induced injury have been thoroughly debunked. Why have so many mothers, the primary caregivers and health care decision-makers for their families, become wary of U.S. health care and one of its most proven prevention techniques? ?
I'm a cultural anthropologist who studies how emotions and beliefs circulate in American society. To explore what lies behind mothers' vaccine skepticism, I interviewed vaccine-skeptical mothers about their perceptions of existing and new vaccines. What they told me complicates the broad and oversimplified depiction of their anxieties by referencing the U.S. health care system itself. Health system failures and harm to women have led to vaccine skepticism and generalized mistrust of medicine.
seeds of women's skepticism
I conducted this ethnographic study in Oregon from 2020 to 2021 with a sample of mostly white mothers between the ages of 25 and 60. My findings reveal new insights into the origins of vaccine skepticism among this population. These women traced their distrust of vaccines, and U.S. health care more generally, to the continuous and repeated medical harm they experienced from childhood to childbirth.
As young girls working in medical offices, they were touched without their consent, yelled at, disbelieved, and threatened. Her mother, Susan, recalled that when she was 12 years old, her pediatrician suddenly put her to sleep and performed a rectal exam on her without her consent. Another mother, Luna, said her pediatrician once threatened to put her in her facility when she complained of her anxiety at her routine checkup.
Women giving birth often felt controlled, pressured, and disrespected. One of her mothers, Merrill, said that during her birth she “felt like she was being forced into Pitocin and induction in pain.” Another mother, Harry, said that throughout her birth experience, “she had a really hard time with her provider.”
Coupled with the complex bureaucracy of commercial medicine, the experience of medical harm contributes, in the words of one mother, to “a million little information touch points” that contribute to the overall unreliability and pernicious effects of U.S. health care. highlighted.
a system that doesn't help them
Many of the mothers I interviewed rejected the assumption that public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration have their children's best interests at heart. Instead, they tied childhood vaccinations and the recent development of COVID-19 vaccines to a bloated pharmaceutical industry and a for-profit medical model. One mother explained: She said, “The FDA doesn't care about our health. They're after their own wealth.”
The women I interviewed lost trust not only in their health care providers but also in the health care system due to continued negative medical practices. The frustrating experience prompted them to “do their own research'' in the name of bodily autonomy. Such research often included books, articles, and podcasts that were deeply critical of vaccines, public health, and pharmaceutical companies.
These materials, which have proliferated since 2020, include past failed vaccine trials, an extensive history of medical harm and abuse, the rapid growth of recommended vaccine schedules in the second half of the 20th century, and the vast sums of money earned from drug development and development. It shines a light on profits. Health care for profit. They confirmed and reinforced women's doubts about American health care.
The stories these women told me add nuance to existing academic research on vaccine skepticism. Most studies believe that vaccine skepticism among primarily white and middle-class parents is a result of today's neoliberal parenting and intensive maternal education. Researchers theorize that vaccine skepticism among white and affluent mothers is a result of consumer medicine and an emphasis on personal choice and risk reduction. Other researchers highlight vaccine skepticism as a collective identity that gives mothers a sense of belonging.
View medical care as a threat to health
The perceptions shared by mothers are by no means isolated, marginal, or irrational. Rather, it represents a growing population of Americans who hold a widespread belief that U.S. health care often does more harm than good.
Data shows that despite rising per capita healthcare spending, the number of medical malpractice cases in the United States exceeds comparable countries, and the number of Americans harmed during treatment remains high. It is shown. A 2023 study found that diagnostic errors, a type of medical error, are responsible for 371,000 deaths and 424,000 permanent disabilities in Americans each year.
Research shows that rates of medical errors in the treatment of vulnerable communities are particularly high, including women, people of color, people with disabilities, the poor, LGBTQ+, gender nonconforming people, and the elderly. ing. The number of U.S. women dying from pregnancy-related causes has increased significantly in recent years, with maternal mortality rates doubling between 1999 and 2019.
The prevalence of medical harm is linked to what philosopher Ivan Ilych's manifesto called “the disease of medical progress.” In his 1982 book, The Nemesis of Medicine, he argued that harm is not accidental but necessarily arises from the very structure of institutionalized, for-profit medicine. “Medical institutions have become a major threat to health,” Ilyich wrote, creating their own “epidemics” of iatrogenic diseases, or illnesses caused by doctors or the health care system itself.
Forty years later, Americans' distrust of health care remains alarmingly high. Only 23% of Americans express high confidence in the health care system. The United States ranks 24th out of 29 high-income countries in the country's level of public trust in health care providers.
For those, like the mothers I interviewed, who have been harmed or perceived to be harmed by health care providers. Have you ever felt disrespected, ignored, or not believed in a doctor's office? Or if you have spent countless hours fighting to pay for, understand, or use health benefits, skepticism and disbelief are rational responses to lived experience. These attitudes do not result solely from ignorance, conspiracy theories, far-right extremism, or hysteria, but rather from the historic and ongoing harms inherent in the U.S. health care system itself.
This article was first published conversation.read Original work.
