Parental trust and beliefs after the discovery of a six-year-long failure to vaccinate

ABSTRACT

Background

In Italy vaccine hesitancy worsened after a failure to vaccinate episode that took place in Friuli Venezia-Giulia Region until early 2017 which undermined herd immunity by leaving unprotected more than 5,444 children.

Methods

Between May and June 2017, 2,557 parents were surveyed at the local vaccination clinic where they were invited within the subsequent extraordinary vaccination campaign. The aim of the survey was to evaluate whether the multi-channel extraordinary vaccination campaign had reached the target population and to know parental beliefs and trusted sources of information after the failure to vaccinate event.

Results

While 279 parents were non-hesitant (10.9%) and 1,491 hesitant acceptors (58.3%), just 38 (1.5%) refused to have their children revaccinated. Overall, the most consulted sources of information were print media (18.8%), physicians (16.0%), relatives and friends (12.1%). The majority of parents considered vaccination as a fundamental practice (73.9%), but many were worried about potential side effects (38.8%) or doubtful about the effectiveness of some vaccines (11.0%). According to parents, 19.7% of them (57) changed their opinion about vaccines after the Codroipo case.

Conclusions

After the Codroipo case, most parents chose to have their children re-vaccinated and just a little proportion refused the re-administration of vaccines. More studies are needed to confirm the importance of a coherent multi-channel communication strategy using both traditional and new media in order to counteract vaccine hesitancy.

KEYWORDS:

• Vaccine preventable diseases
• immunization
• failure to vaccinate
• vaccine hesitancy
• health information

Authors’ contribution

LB, PT and FV designed the study; AP, Md’A and FR collected data; LB, FR wrote the article; PPB, AI, FM, FV and SB revised intellectual contents; all authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interests

No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.

Research involving human participants

Procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards, 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Due to the urgent, unexpected and threatening situation that parents were living, being their children potentially unprotected against vaccine preventable diseases, we opted for completely anonymous questionnaires in accordance to European regulation (EU-GDPR), assuring participants that neither any personal identifier would have ever been collected nor any personal choice/vaccine status linked to their questionnaire.

Informed consent

Oral informed consent was obtained from all participants included in the study, as written consent was not required being data completely anonymous. Oral vs written consent was chosen for convenience. Participation was voluntary, questionnaires were not collected in absence of consent.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.