With every twist and turn of the COVID-19 pandemic, journalists, governments, policymakers and researchers have increasingly used the term ‘vaccine hesitancy’ to account for why so many people remain unvaccinated even in nations where supplies are plentiful. The share of papers with ‘vaccine’ or ‘vaccination’ in the title that also mention ‘hesitancy’ rose from 3.3% in 2019 to 8.3% in 2021 (see ‘The power of words’), according to a Web of Science search.
The most striking lesson from the pandemic is that preoccupation with vaccine hesitancy — whatever that term might mean to different people — centres too much of the responsibility for the success (or not) of a vaccination programme on individuals.
It is mainly governments that have the power to make vaccines both accessible and acceptable. Before the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out, a survey indicated that people living in Chile were more reluctant to get vaccinated than were those in other Latin American countries1. Yet more than 89% of Chile’s population has been fully vaccinated, as defined by that nation. And an early analysis indicates that this is largely thanks to vaccination being prioritized politically2. In a pre-pandemic example, Australia’s federal government started to introduce various improvements to childhood immunization programmes in 1997, including financial incentives for parents and doctors. Childhood vaccination rates rose from around 84% to 94% within three years33.
Read more at Nature.