Dr. Jennifer Reich

And when a pregnant woman was exposed to the virus and became infected, it often caused devastating outcomes for her fetus.

And so the best way to protect pregnant women, it turns out, is to protect small children because it turns out pregnant women are often around young children.

And then the people who receive the vaccines would go on and have their own bodies and their own future fetuses protected or their partners and thinking about the sort of general intergenerational benefit of that rubella vaccine.

It's indisputable the difference it's made in terms of rates of congenital rubella syndrome, blindness, deafness.

We can see the difference.

But it's not necessarily a vaccine that personally benefits you, but it's really important for the community.

There's other vaccines that are largely about you that benefit you most exquisitely.

The tetanus vaccine has no community benefit, but tetanus is a terrible disease.

And to cure it or to treat it is a very resource intensive process of gathering enough antitoxins, often across multiple states from multiple poison control centers to save one child or one person who's infected.

And that's a vaccine entirely about personal benefit.

So vaccines work differently for different people, but they're part of these broader strategies.

In my study, I found families who have different vaccine strategies for each child in their family because they really weighed vaccines as a risk and benefit for each person separately at different times of their lives and came to totally different conclusions.

And that's not typically how we think of public health interventions working, and it's definitely not how they work best.

One of the questions we can really ask is, where has vaccine mistrust come from?

Why do we have such high rates of suspicion?

And I'll say that even for parents who vaccinate their children, who consent to all vaccines, they also express some anxiety about the decision.

As they do their own risk-benefit calculations, they've decided the benefits of vaccine exceed whatever fears they have.

But very few people are uniformly excited about vaccines.

And that's a really interesting new question because we can look back historically at eras where people were willing to fight and bribe their way into getting access to things like polio vaccines.

People were desperate for access to lifesaving vaccines.