Dr. Jennifer Reich

And so that family member was stacking up what is a 3% reduction in risk stacked against other health outcomes of chemotherapy, other sacrifices I would make to my long-term health or my ability to participate socially.

What is 3% in your life?

And I watched this with fascination because so many people in my family had really different interpretations

of what that 3% means.

And that was just such an important reminder that we are calculating probabilities and risks every day all the time, but we do so in a way that really comes more from our intuition and our heart than it does from our math calculations.

And so keeping that in mind too, that those same statistics, one in a million,

is both high and not high, right?

Like what is one in a million risk?

If it's your family, it's a hundred percent.

So how do we start to think through what people need to make decisions that feel good to them, that feel that they're comfortable with and that align with their goals and values for their own families?

When I started studying this question a very long time ago,

The thing that surprised me most is at the time there was clear evidence that the people who were most distrustful of vaccines and most likely to opt out of vaccines by choice were white married women with some college education.

And that just seemed counterintuitive to me because everything I know would say that middle-class and affluent white families would trust the government and trust the state and trust science more, not less.

So how do I make sense of this pattern?

And what I

came to in talking to healthcare providers and Medicaid providers and more families is that if this is really your priority in terms of decision-making,

It often means that other kinds of concerns have been met.

You have housing stability.

You have adequate food for your family.

You are able to absorb a 21-day quarantine if whooping cough shows up at your child's school without getting fired from your job, right?