“Vaccines, are one of our most powerful public health tools, and we need people to have confidence in them if they are to be most effective”.
A new global survey has revealed that citizens of high-income countries have the lowest confidence in vaccines.
The findings come from The Wellcome Trust, a UK medical research charity, who asked more than 140,000 people aged 15 and older in more than 140 countries about their attitudes towards health and science.
Globally, they found that about 8 in 10 people (79%) agreed that vaccines are safe, and 9 in 10 worldwide say their children have been vaccinated, but Wellcome said there were pockets where trust levels in vaccines is worrying.
Just 59% of people in Western Europe agreed that vaccines are safe.
The survey found that Bangladesh and Rwanda had the strongest confidence in vaccines. Almost all people in both those countries agree that vaccines are safe, effective and important for children.
However faith in vaccines was less prominent in higher income countries.
In North America only 72% of people in North America agreed that vaccines are safe. While across the continent of Europe, that figure is even lower with 59% in Western Europe and 40% in Eastern Europe.
In France one-third of its inhabitants don’t agree that vaccines are safe, and one-tenth don’t agree that they are important for children to have.
“The rising vaccine hesitancy in France over the past several years — which even now includes some members of the medical community — has helped drive vaccine coverage among some children and young adults below immunity thresholds and led to rising numbers of measles and meningococcal disease cases, ” the report says.
It adds that more research is needed into the role that social media and misinformation campaigns have played in generating skepticism around vaccination.
“Anxieties and public concerns about the safety of vaccines have always existed, but the rise of social media has allowed the spread of what UNICEF calls the ‘real infection of misinformation’ to much wider audiences,” the report says.
The vaccine debate has been in the public forum in the last few years, with more and more people deeming them unsafe.
This is despite a comeback in diseases that were once largely eradicated in certain areas, such as the measles.
The full findings of the survey can be read here.
