Pro-Vaccine Messages Actually Backfire, Study Finds

The people are waking up. Don't trust the greedy drug companies. 

Public health messages aimed at boosting childhood vaccination rates may be backfiring, a new report finds.

Current efforts that use scientific studies, vaccine facts and images and stories of disease-sickened kids actually increased fears about vaccine side effects among some parents. They made parents who were the most wary less inclined to inoculate their children.

That's according to a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, which raises questions about the effectiveness of well-funded public health vaccination campaigns and the difficulty of swaying vaccine views, particularly when they’re entrenched.

“If these messages were working, they should increase the intent to vaccinate,” said Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College political scientist and media critic who led the study. “This highlights the extent to which we tend to overrate how persuasive facts and evidence are in all kinds of domains.”

But anti-vaccination researchers say the study correctly spotlights the suspicion that some parents have for public health claims about vaccines.

“It is a big mistake for public health officials to assume that those resisting public health messaging about vaccines and diseases are ignorant, uneducated, ‘anti-science’ and that they lack social conscience,” said Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center and a frequent critic of vaccines.

Michael Belkin, 60, a Seattle vaccine critic whose infant daughter died in 1998 after recommended shots, said parents want to make up their own minds.

“People are skeptical about drug companies. Why should they not be skeptical about vaccines?” he said.

Nyhan and colleagues looked at messages designed to reduce vaccine misperceptions and increase vaccination rates with the measles-mumps-rubella, or MMR, shots. They conducted two waves of email surveys of a nationally representative sample of nearly 1,760 U.S. parents of children younger than 18 in June and July 2011.

Parents were asked about their vaccine views first, and later exposed to one of four messages: information about the lack of evidence that the MMR vaccine causes autism; a vaccine pamphlet about the risks of getting the diseases; photos of children affected with the diseases; and a first-person narrative from a mom whose son got measles. A control group also received non-vaccine related information.

CDC

Images of children sickened with diseases that can be prevented by vaccines -- like this baby with rubella -- actually appeared to make parents more worried about vaccination, the opposite of health officials’ goals.

Overall, none of the messages increased parents’ intent to vaccinate future children, the study found. Those who supported vaccines still planned to get shots for their kids and those who didn’t are persuaded to change.

Source: 

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/pro-vaccine-messages-actually-backfire-study-finds-n41611