Survey: Trust in vaccines declines among teenagers, parents
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Key takeaways:
- Most parents and teenagers reported concerns about the safety of vaccines in general.
- Only 46% of parents and 33% of teenagers felt it important to receive the latest COVID-19 vaccine.
TORONTO — Trust in vaccines declined among parents and teenagers over a period of time that included the COVID-19 pandemic, according to survey results presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting.
The survey was conducted by Unity Consortium, a group focused on overcoming barriers to vaccination that originally surveyed teens and parents in 2016 and then again during the COVID-19 pandemic about vaccine knowledge, attitudes and behaviors.
“We noticed through our clinical work that the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to shift patients’ attitudes and approaches to all vaccines, not just COVID-19 vaccines,” Amy R. Grube, MD, FAAP, assistant professor of pediatrics at Case Western University School of Medicine, and Amy Middleman, MD, MSEd, MPH, endowed chair at UH Hospitals/Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, told Healio in a joint statement. “People seemed much more willing to decline vaccinations since the COVID-19 pandemic. This was a worrisome trend that we wanted to continue to study.”
The consortium directed a nationwide online survey in October 2023 that included questions created through expert consensus that were follow-ups and extensions of questions from prior surveys conducted in October 2020, February 2021 and June 2021. They received responses from 507 parents and 512 adolescents aged between 13 and 18 years and compared them with responses collected in 2021.
The authors found that in 2023, 70% of parents and 56% of teenagers felt that it was important teens receive all recommended vaccines to stay healthy. This was a decline from 85% of parents and 82% of teenagers in June 2021.
Also in 2023, 60% of parents and 61% of teenagers reported concerns about the safety of vaccines in general, and 58% of all participants reported concerns about efficacy — similar responses to 2021.
Additionally, only 46% of parents and 33% of teenagers felt it important to receive the latest COVID-19 vaccine, and 38% of parents and 40% of teenagers said they did not plan for the teen to receive the newest COVID-19 vaccine.
“We had experienced increases in vaccine declination clinically, so to see the data show that vaccine refusal had indeed increased was not surprising,” Grube and Middleman said.
The parents and teenagers were also surveyed about their most trustworthy source for information about vaccines, with 65% of parents indicating trust in primary care providers and 55% reporting trust in pharmacists.
“We were pleasantly surprised to see that primary care providers continued to be identified by parents and teens as a trusted source of information, and that trust in social media as a source of vaccine information was low,” Grube and Middleman said. “We were also pleasantly surprised that the pandemic had expanded people’s comfort with alternative facilities to receive vaccines.”
Grube and Middleman said they are continuing to analyze responses and are planning studies to explore “vaccine hesitancy and strategies to improve vaccine uptake in communities of varying degrees of social vulnerability.”
“Study after study has shown that provider recommendation is the strongest known predictor of whether a patient receives a vaccination,” they told Healio. “Providers ideally should become familiar with communication strategies shown to improve vaccine uptake, including using a presumptive approach to vaccine recommendations and the use of motivational interviewing techniques.”
Collapse
Grube AR, et al. Abstract 59. Presented at: Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting; May 2-6, 2024; Toronto.
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts