COVID-19 vaccines for children received a good deal of scrutiny when they first became available in 2021. Chatter online and elsewhere indicated that parents were becoming less likely to vaccinate their children due to growing misinformation around the COVID-19 vaccines.
But were parents really becoming more vaccine-hesitant because of rumors about the COVID-19 vaccines? Sean O’Leary, MD, MPH, a professor of pediatrics in the Section of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and an investigator at the Adult & Child Center for Outcomes Research & Delivery Science (ACCORDS), wasn’t so sure.
“Throughout the pandemic, you saw a lot of headlines around COVID vaccine refusal and how that refusal was spilling over into other routine vaccines,” O’Leary says. “But a lot of that was based on stories or personal narratives, interviews with parents or pediatricians or family doctors. I work with a lot of general pediatricians, and I’m married to one, and I was hearing the other side of that coin — that some people who formerly refused vaccines were now asking to catch their kids up. It seemed a lot more complicated than simply, ‘People are refusing COVID vaccines, so now more are refusing other routine childhood vaccines.’”