Dr. Jennifer Reich

And so to think about how has that shifted is really important.

I think we saw historically examples where medical professionals were overly convinced, like they were selling the story that vaccines are always safe and always necessary.

And so when parents saw adverse reactions, which are very rare, but do occur, they often felt dismissed and ignored.

And we saw this during the early days of the former pertussis vaccine, which was a wholesale vaccine, which is different than the one given today.

And there's disagreement in the medical profession still to this day of whether that was correlation or causation.

I've interviewed a lot of people who work in the vaccine injury compensation system who highlight that those claims went away when the vaccine changed.

And that's a reason to believe it was probably related in a very small number of people.

But that's a real consequence.

It also tracks on to other kinds of conversations that we saw around distrust of health care.

We could think of the women's health movement and women who were being dismissed about their experiences there.

In reproductive health, there are experiences of side effects of things like birth control pills, right?

We can think historically of the way birthing rights movements, movements towards other kinds of control of one's own health were really important to healthcare and made healthcare often better.

Arguments about access to HIV and AIDS drugs through the 1980s that really changed the regulatory process were really significant.

And so the early days of vaccine hesitancy really bump up against a lot of these other social movements and take some of the information about how my lived experience matches what experts are telling me is true.

Part of that individualization is we often trust our own sense of what's true more than patterns across the population feel relevant to us.

And so when we think about how do people come to really question, do I need all vaccines?

Vaccines are many times conceptualized even amongst people who like them as a necessary evil concept.

And that's a really important thing to really question about why we've gotten to that place where less is always more.

Part of it is that there's distrust of pharmaceuticals in general, right?

So the idea that less is more feels true when it comes to medicine, that, you know, you should avoid as much medicine as possible.