Posted on 07/28/2026 7:06:02 PM PDT by DoodleBob
As long as there have been vaccines, there have been people who doubted their science and safety.
Back in 19th-century England, people rioted against a mandatory smallpox vaccine, claiming that it violated civil rights and was an affront to human bodily integrity. In the United States, organizations dedicated to resisting vaccines have existed since the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League of Brooklyn was established in 1894.
Researchers generally refer to people who do not follow the standard advice of health professionals about vaccines, by either refusing or delaying some or all vaccines, as vaccine hesitant. Today, vaccine hesitancy is most famously associated with the Make America Healthy Again movement and its standard-bearer, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Public health advocates and science communicators have largely tried to counter these ideas by offering accurate, factual information. But as a medical humanities researcher studying how groups that embrace vaccine hesitancy craft their message, I’ve learned that part of why vaccine hesitancy is so hard to combat is how these groups use storytelling to spread their views.
Vaccine-hesitant groups have fewer limitations than pro-vaccine groups on the kinds of stories they can tell about the development and impact of vaccines. While science-driven messaging that encourages vaccination has to be faithful to the complex and often uneventful reality of science, vaccine-skeptic stories tend to make more dynamic claims.
It’s easy to assume that people who mistrust vaccines are undereducated, and therefore, that providing better information about science and vaccines would increase confidence in vaccines. This is sometimes called the information deficit approach.
In response to this perceived information deficit, public health experts and science communicators have worked hard to create accessibly written, welcoming educational materials about vaccines in order to help improve scientific literacy.
But this approach has had only limited success. One indication: The number of people who express vaccine-hesitant views continues to grow.
This partly relates to a misunderstanding about vaccine hesitancy: It’s not that people don’t understand science or don’t have access to high-quality medical information. Vaccine hesitancy is what policymakers call a “wicked problem” – one that’s particularly hard to solve because it’s fueled by a range of issues, including misinformation, the desire for social belonging and deeply held religious beliefs.
People’s ideas about vaccines are shaped by many factors, and vaccine hesitancy rarely stems from a simple lack of accurate information.While there are many stereotypes about what kind of person is vaccine hesitant, the truth is that there is no single category of person who expresses skepticism. Vaccine hesitancy includes people with higher education degrees and better-than-average levels of health literacy.
People might embrace these views for many reasons – for example, because they do not trust the medical system, are critical of the government, are trying to protect their child or are connecting with compelling narratives – for example, about personal freedom.
To some degree, all health information mixes science and storytelling. A patient’s medical history, for example, simply strings together a person’s health information into a coherent tale.
But vaccine-hesitant groups are particularly adept at using narrative to craft compelling, nerve-wracking or highly emotion-driven stories of doctors ignoring patient concerns and children developing devastating health conditions after getting vaccinated.
What makes these stories the secret weapons of vaccine hesitancy is that they often are not actually about vaccines at all. When vaccines become detached from medicine, they can function like a symbol or a metaphor in a story, reflecting a worldview that encompasses much more than medicine and is fueled by nonmedical anxieties. These stories use narrative strategies, including some drawn from film and literature, to undermine vaccine confidence.
For example, online forums use vaccine refusal as an example of civil resistance to a totalitarian government, symbolizing a loss of general individual freedom – even when vaccines pose no practical threat to their political or social liberty. In some contexts, refusing the COVID-19 vaccine in particular has been framed as a sign of overall psychological or mental strength.
Under Kennedy, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has started to release material that matches the messaging, ideas and narrative strategies of vaccine-hesitant groups.
When the CDC announced a rollback of the childhood vaccine schedule, for example, the press release characterized the proposed changes as a return to what the agency is calling “individual-based decision-making.” Kirk Milhoan, the Kennedy-appointed head of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a panel of experts that advises the CDC on vaccines, described vaccine debates as a question of “autonomy versus public health.”
Treating vaccines as representing a challenge to individuality or autonomy highlights a possible philosophical and existential threat, but in the process, it minimizes real physical risk. Here, the story implies that vaccines are a threat to individuality. Medically, that’s not true. But thematically, the references to threatened individuality suggest that people are feeling vulnerable and afraid. In this story, vaccines symbolize perceived dangers to a person’s sense of self, not real medical ones.
As vaccine hesitancy continues to pose a challenge to public health, it seems increasingly clear that promoting health and scientific literacy, on their own, won’t be enough to allay the concerns of people who have aligned their ideas about vaccines with broader narratives about untrustworthy institutions and physical risk.
Yet dismissing the perspectives of people who raise concerns about vaccines risks losing opportunities to better understand the complex reasons that draw someone to vaccine hesitancy. Those reasons are often shaped by people’s experiences with medicine and other institutions. For example, there are many well-founded reasons for vulnerable or marginalized groups to be wary of the medical establishment. For some Black Americans, for example, the legacy of forced medical experimentation and systemic discrimination forms a sound basis for being skeptical of health recommendations from the government.
Some researchers studying public health and communication have started to embrace strategies that engage with literary features, such as symbolism, to address vaccine hesitancy. This includes both identifying the specific storytelling techniques at play to make them less persuasive and acknowledging the perspective, critiques and experiences of vaccine-hesitant people to create a more respectful environment.
Understanding the narratives and learning from the valid critiques that draw people into feeling hesitant about vaccines offers a more nuanced way to understand these views – and may open the way for a more inclusive and respectful approach to healthcare.
Abolish unconstitutional liability protections forever!
refusing the COVID-19 vaccine in particular has been framed as a sign of overall psychological or mental strength.
Because it is...
mRna vaxes are problematic and they can kill. Back in the day, the swine flu vaccine killed about 3 people and they pulled it immediately. The wuhan flu shots killed or maimed thousands and they tell you not to believe your own lying eyes.
Be a cold day in hell before I ever believe these aholes again.
You are so right
Gina Milan@ginamilan_
The Real Reason They Created COVID
COVID wasn’t some random outbreak from a wet market. It was engineered. It was deliberate. And the goal was never public health.
It was created to steal the election from Trump.
It was created to lock down the entire country.
And it was created so Democrats could open the border and bring millions of illegal aliens into America while the rest of us were trapped in our homes under so-called “emergency” orders.
Think about the timing. Think about the coordination. Think about how every major institution suddenly moved in lockstep. The media. Big Tech. Public health agencies. Democrat governors. All pushing the same narrative, enforcing the same restrictions, and attacking anyone who dared question it.
While Americans were locked down, small businesses were destroyed, and children were kept out of school, the southern border was effectively left wide open. Millions entered. No accountability. No transparency. Just a massive demographic shift under the cover of a “pandemic.”
They didn’t just want Trump out of office. They wanted to permanently reshape the country so someone like Trump could never win again. The lockdowns weren’t about stopping a virus. They were about stopping the American people from seeing what was happening in real time.
This wasn’t incompetence.
This was the plan.
COVID was the perfect cover. Create the crisis. Steal the election. Lock down the country. Flood America with illegal aliens. Then act surprised when the consequences become impossible to ignore.
They thought we’d never connect the dots.
They were wrong.
10:26 AM · Jul 28, 2026
This article is not about me because I am not “vaccine hesitant”.
I am vaccine hostile.
The story is written in the classic condescending tone we have come to expect.
“We are the experts. You are the ignorant rubes. Well, maybe you have some minor points and not all of you are ignorant rubes, so we can pretend to listen to you and then maybe you will learn to obey your masters.”
the swine flu vaccine killed about 3 people and they pulled it immediately.
Each and every one of us is unique. Our reactions are unique.
But when we understand how complex things are it leads to answers like God. But we can’t have that so we go back to the one data point so we think we can understand the situation.
“What is the net effect?”
That is the way the “experts” think.
Humans become cattle to be herded by “experts”—and if some of the cattle are injured or die on the range—well, ya know stuff happens...
The reality is that we cannot trust the “studies” on net effect because those doing the studies are biased—often funded directly or indirectly by Big Pharma.
The “experts” have no problem sending the cattle through a minefield—when the “experts” have unreliable maps as to where the mines might be, or how numerous the mines are, or to what extent the mines will just injure instead of kill the cattle.
Fart-sniffing elitism full of pompous arrogance, using an excessive number of words to obscure the argument in an intentionally obtuse cloud of vagaries. One can see the disdain dripping off the article.
The only appropriate response is, Sod OFF!”
You can’t look at one data point and understand a complex situation.
Yeah...I can. The result was a failed vaccine that caused less harm than wuhan vaxes ever did.
The evidence of harm vs help is the metric? We are doing ratios now and calling it science?
We were played, plain and simple. And too many people try to excuse it.
“We are doing ratios now and calling it science?”
Mengele Science.
Yep - like you said:
Want to take the “skepticism” out?
“Abolish unconstitutional liability protections forever!”
I bet a LOT of vaccines and policies on how they’re administered would suddenly disappear.
Reasonable people can have reasonable debates on the topic of vaccinations.
In large measure, most of the shots are administered to children.
Therefore, let’s start from a factual baseline. Before 2025, the CDC Guidelines would have a baby get 21 vaccines by six months of age.
whoa, that was so much propaganda garbage I wanted to puke. People WE THE PEOPLE HAVE A RIGHT to choose if we want to GET a vaccine OR NOT. I’m 71 and have never had a FLU SHOT. Can count the times I’ve had the flu on one hand. Stop letting these leftist medias lead you over a cliff. THINK FOR YOURSELVES. You are very capable of taking care of YOUR OWN HEALTH.
And that’s an actual number of 50-70 doses.
But people are “skeptical” if they dare question The Expertz.
Yep - and Fauci’s diary boasts about how famous and world renown he became - this fop was the one who told us to trust the science while declaring himself to be the science.
I know some here still swear by the Covid clot shots, but how many have done actual research on survivability rates
BTW,
Covid survivability rates averaged over 99.5%, just slightly behind Flu survival rates, yet one caused a world-wide panic and the other is yawned off each and every year....and these were pre-vaccine rates - and they claimed 90-95% efficacy rates for Covid (which supposedly made the survivability frates the same as for the Flu - and they claim that was a huge difference and a tribute to the shots that damaged/killed so many), while the best they can do with Flu, after all these years is 40-60% on good years.
What are the odds of that?
But the AIs are still programmed to make excuses and repeat the lies of “the science”. The “anomaly” was because they caught the Covid before it had a chance to mutate. And hey say that even though it started t mutate, the jabs they were developing were “remarkably effective” in lessening the effects of the sick.
And some idiots still wonder why there’s so much skepticism.
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