Social media has made it easy for people to voice their political views and issues with trust in the government. Federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) come up a lot with those questioning vaccines, so I wonder:
Have vaccination rates been falling due to lost trust in public health agencies?
To find out, I turned to Taylor Holroyd, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
In Taylor’s dissertation, she is looking at trust in public health authorities, school immunization law, and how vaccine knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs can all impact vaccine decision-making and, subsequently, vaccine coverage.
She’s particularly interested, among many other aspects of vaccinations, in looking at how and whether people trust public health authorities, such as the CDC, US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and state and local public health authorities.
Taylor wants to know whether people trust public health authorities differently than they trust healthcare providers or other parts of the government, and how that trust impacts whether they follow vaccine recommendations.
Widespread vaccination has been a huge public health success, but this success has been threatened to some extent by increasing vaccine hesitancy both in the US and in other countries.
Taylor