Dr. David Higgins

In fact, that's a part of good science and good vaccine policymaking.

And then the question also talks about whether it's damaging to enforce vaccine uptake.

And my first thought is that if vaccine uptake is enforced in an overly harsh way, that actually can backfire and decrease uptake.

So even though I am a champion for vaccines and I recommend vaccines every day to my patients in clinic, even then, I would be somewhere in the middle of this question.

We've known for several years that the attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines are very different than some other vaccines, like say those for measles.

And the challenge is when a person is asked about whether they think vaccines are safe.

If in their mind, they're thinking about the COVID-19 vaccine, they may have very strong views and may answer that question very differently than they would for other vaccines.

So that makes it difficult sometimes to tell if shifting attitudes about vaccines are shifting attitudes toward all vaccines or shifting attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines that are then appearing in the data to show shifting attitudes toward all vaccines.

I worry that with that question, they made a similar mistake, right?

Again, because you're asking about multiple different things.

So I hesitate to use this data point to say that the headline question is inconsistent, although it sure does look like it challenges the interpretation.