Why Don't People Want to Vaccinate Their Kids?

Some parents are concerned with vaccine safety broadly or rare vaccine side effects specifically, while questioning the efficacy of giving vaccines to healthy people in the first place.

Some parents believe that vaccines overload children’s immune systems, or that “natural immunity” is preferable to vaccine-induced immunity.

Some parents believe that their children can avoid vaccination because a high enough percentage of the population is vaccinated to keep a given disease at bay. (Choosing not to vaccinate for that reason was described by one popular anti-vaccine doctor as “hiding in the herd.”)

Some Parents Belive In 'Alternative Medicine'.

Some parents are distrustful of the medical system, science, or anything recommended by government in general.

There are also those who scour the primary academic literature in an attempt to understand the science behind vaccines.

In 1998, press coverage of British physician Andrew Wakefield’s spe- cious claims linking the MMR vaccine to bowel disease and autism caused pub- lic confidence in the vaccine to plummet. In England, MMR coverage rates dropped from nearly 93 percent in 1997 to 79.9 percent in 2003–2004.

Surveys and studies point to a myriad of reasons that parents request non-medical exemptions. Some are so unfamiliar with the diseases vaccines protect against that they conclude the vaccines themselves are unnecessary.