Vaccines are very much in the news at the moment, but they have been around for over a hundred and fifty years. They may have done more to transform health than any other single measure other than access to clean water during that time. Yet there has always been a suspicion in part of the population that vaccines are not a good thing, varying from concern and hesitancy to outright opposition. And very often Christians have been at the forefront of this opposition. Why is that? What are the causes of vaccine hesitancy and scepticism, how have they manifested down the years, and what can we do to tackle them?
In a conversation with Annika Wilder-Smith and Laurence Crutchlow, Steve Fouch explores these questions.
Laurence has written a CMF File on Vaccines which can be downloaded from the CMF website, while Annika has published a paper on the resurgence of measles in Europe and the link to vaccine hesitancy in the Journal of Epidemiological and Global Health.