What do we really know about social resistance to vaccines?

Sara Gorman explores some of the factors behind anti-vaccination movements. Last year, polio eradication efforts were severely compromised by a rash of killings by militants in Pakistan and Nigeria. Between December 2012 and January 2013, at least 16 polio workers were killed in Pakistan. In early February, more bad news arrived: 9 health workers were murdered in northern Nigeria while working on the polio eradication campaign. Potential explanations and suggestions for future action poured out following the attacks. Some people thought the CIA’s actions years earlier in the Bin Laden assassination laid the groundwork for Pakistani suspicion of Western vaccination campaigns. By employing a Pakistani doctor to gain entry into what was thought to be the Bin Laden compound by feigning a vaccination program, the agency perhaps stirred local suspicion of the real motives behind Western-based vaccination campaigns. Of course, the resistance to polio vaccination is also largely political, especially in countries...