Dr. Jennifer Reich

I started thinking about vaccine hesitancy because I was interested in how families make decisions for themselves and their children.

And how do they decide what's in the best interest?

And I start with the premise that everybody wants healthy, successful children.

And if we start with this basis, then we can ask questions about how we have such different perceptions of the same thing sometimes.

I started thinking about this, oh, about 15 years ago.

And at the time I had young children myself.

And I was also a postdoctoral fellow in health policy.

And a lot of my life was spent talking to researchers and healthcare providers who were really increasingly frustrated that they didn't understand why people didn't trust their opinion about vaccines.

And at the same time, I was a parent with young children, talking to other parents, watching online conversations.

And often hearing this story about how you don't really need vaccines anymore, as long as you support nutrition, as long as you breastfeed, as long as you work hard as a mother, you can avoid the worst outcomes of infectious disease.

And because I had one foot in each of these worlds, I was really fascinated about this disconnect.

And so I really started thinking about this at a time when not a lot of people were actually that worried about vaccines.

We hadn't seen measles in a long time.

And I remember even at the time, researchers in my field would ask, like, why are you studying this question?

Like, who cares about vaccines?

But I could see under the surface that there was this growing discontent.

I spent almost a decade talking to parents, talking to healthcare providers, attending conferences and organizational meetings online.

of groups that oppose vaccine mandates, of really trying to educate myself of how people come to understand vaccines and then how they make decisions that work for them in the ways that they imagine are best aligned in their lives.

And what that allowed me to see is that a lot of the ways that healthcare providers and public health experts imagine these parents is really different than what I saw in reality.

I think it's really easy to assume people make decisions because they're ignorant, because they don't understand all the facts.