Rethinking Vaccine Hesitancy: A Crisis of Trust
Dr. Maya Goldenberg kicked off the two-week virtual Global Health Learning Symposium speaker’s series with her keynote address titled “Rethinking Vaccine Hesitancy”. A philosopher and author of Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise, and the War on Science (2021), Dr. Goldenberg set out to challenge complex factors and her own understanding of vaccine hesitancy.
Through a riveting presentation that challenged preconceptions of vaccine hesitant individuals, she unraveled some of the greatest misconceptions around vaccine hesitancy. Dr. Goldenberg challenged the audience to reconsider approaches employed when working to bridge the gap with those who are vaccine hesitant and those who are not. Rather than focus on scientific literacy and vaccine myth busting, she addressed the question: Why do people with the most access to resources hesitate or refuse vaccines? Through this lens and exploring hesitancy in the context of pediatrics vaccines and past epidemics and pandemics, Dr. Goldenberg highlighted that hesitancy is often due to “a lack of trust, not a lack of understanding.” Indeed, vaccine hesitancy, according to Goldenberg, is “an ideological and social problem more than an information problem.” She further elaborated, that this hesitancy “signals a crisis of trust between the public and the institution that structures civic life” in which a rejection or questioning of science is really a proxy to an underlying issue: a call for structural to response to past and ongoing inequities and injustices.
Perhaps more relevant than ever before, COVID-19 has highlighted areas of mistrust between the public and the government. While the media suggests focusing on providing information to the public and encouraging vaccine participation, Dr. Goldenberg proposed a new solution: addressing the mistrust that the public has toward “the product, the providers, and the policy-makers.” She emphasized the importance of confronting the “financial conflicts of interest in health science research and health care” and addressing the “impact of medical racism and health injustices [past and present] on vaccine attitudes.”
In addition to the discussion about the importance of building relationships of trust in healthcare settings, MSc Global Health student Marwah Sadat offered her perspective in her closing remarks to thank Dr. Goldenberg. She stated that, “trust becomes especially important when working with populations and contexts that face a history of medical mistrust due to colonialism, structural violence, medical neglect, and exploitation.”
This webinar is the first of 5 in a series, Global Health Speaker Series which forms part of the Master of Science in Global Health program’s global health symposium. Stay tuned for recordings of webinars which will be posted in the coming weeks.
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