Dr. Jennifer Reich

Do my children need this?

Will we personally benefit from it?

And if not, we don't want it.

And that's a really different perspective than the people in my community need high levels of immunity to protect others who are vulnerable.

The other factor that plays a part in this is the way we've individualized most of parenting.

And so we've seen over the last several decades a higher focus on things like school choice.

The idea that some children can have terrible schools as long as your kids don't have to go to them.

Rather than saying, how do we make sure all children in the community have adequate schools or have safe environments or have enough to eat, right?

It's a very different perspective to say, like, I want to make sure my children are okay, but I'm not responsible for other people's children.

And that separation then also allows vaccines to become

a kind of question of, do we really need them?

Are they important?

If I'm really focused on my child as the centerpiece of my decision-making rather than part of this community conversation.

And so when I think about those two pieces together, this kind of personal responsibility for health and also this personal responsibility for your own children, but not necessarily all children, vaccine hesitancy then is a really logical outcome.

Because not all vaccines are equally beneficial to everybody.

They're not all equally necessary at all points in the life course, right?

But they all are part of this larger community strategy for protecting individuals.

So to give you a really concrete example, the rubella vaccine, which came about in the 1960s, is a vaccination that's uniformly recommended for all children.

But the truth is that rubella is not a particularly significant illness for children when they get it.

The reason vaccines are recommended for children is because before the vaccine, rubella was the leading cause of birth defects in the United States.