Charlotte McDonald
speaker
483 appearances
11 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2012
last heard 11 Jun
Charlotte McDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Then, on the 14th of April, a new poll published by online news site Politico added a big claim into the mix.
Here's the article's headline.
But is that what the survey actually found?
This is David Higgins, a paediatrician and public health assistant professor who writes a substack called Community Immunity.
David's not wrong.
The idea that more Americans doubt vaccine safety than trust it would represent a sizeable shift in US public opinion.
For example, a Reuters Ipsos poll in February found that 84% of respondents said vaccines for diseases like measles, mumps and rubella are safe for children.
A Pew poll from November found that 84% of Americans thought the benefits of the MMR jab
outweighed the risks, a slight fall from 88% in 2023.
So what's going on with the Politico poll that found that more Americans doubt vaccine safety than trust it?
In the Politico poll, 39% of respondents indicated their view was closer to the first statement, that the science on vaccines is clear and it is damaging to question it.
46% were closest to the second, the facts on vaccines are still up for debate and it is damaging to enforce their uptake.
Hence, the headline that more Americans doubt vaccine safety than trust it.
But David is not convinced.
I mean, questions one and three are pretty close, but you get the picture.
These overlapping questions make it very hard to know exactly which part of the question is driving the answer.
The point here is the article headline makes a specific claim about vaccine safety, seemingly on the basis of this question, but it's very hard to know which part of it is driving that response.
Is it concerns about vaccine safety or vaccine science or the enforcement of vaccine uptake or personal freedom?
One more thing to consider is some of these questions, it's not clear which vaccines we're talking about.
Politico put a link to the full survey data in their article.
Showing 101–120 of 483 · page 6 of 25
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