This is especially true of things we put inside our body. I will admit: it is easy for a worry about what might happen to roll down a mental hill and grow in size, like a snowball, until our imagined risks are all we can see. Some of the factors driving vaccine hesitancy are very primal and instinctual, while others play on our desire to find a rational, scientific-sounding justification for our decision.
Add to this list calculation, which is the thought process that leads you to decide if the vaccine is right for you or not, and collective responsibility, and we have the 5C model which describes the psychology at play. Many people face constraints to getting vaccinated, whether it’s a fear of needles or the lack of time to go get vaccinated and ride out the potential temporary side effects. There is complacency: downplaying the risks of contracting the disease and not seeing the benefits of the vaccine. Some people’s trust in governments and in pharmaceutical companies has been eroded to the point of paralyzing doubt. There is confidence, meaning trusting (or not) the people involved in the development, authorization and manufacturing of the vaccines. There is no simple portrait of who these people are it’s a somewhat diverse group that arrives at hesitancy for reasons that can be sorted into five categories. Dig down the Earth, go through the core, emerge at the other side and come back, and you have an idea of the size of this thing.ĭespite the wide use of these vaccines, their proper testing in clinical trials, and their clear effectiveness in the real world (and the absence of massive deaths from the vaccine in the elderly that some anti-vaxxers predicted), a small percentage of people admit they could be persuaded to get the vaccine but would rather not. If you think of each syringe carrying a dose as a pencil, and you put these 4.8 billion pencils side by side like they are in a colouring box, you end up with a line that is almost twice the length of the Earth’s diameter. Even with my scientific background, I cannot easily wrap my head around this number, 4.8 billion. As I write this, 4.8 billion doses of a COVID-19 vaccine have been administered globally.
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