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Readers are encouraged to go to the websites of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) for the perspective of federal agencies responsible for vaccine research, development, regulation and policymaking, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) for information on vaccine policymaking; to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for information on regulating vaccines for safety and effectiveness; and to National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for information on research and the development of new vaccines.
The World Health Organization has stated that “vaccine hesitancy” is one of the top 10 global public health threats.
Surveys and focus groups show that health care workers, as well as members of the general public, may avoid getting swine flu shots when supplies become available this fall.
In May of this year researchers distributed 810 questionnaires to public hospital workers. Less than half of the nearly 400 workers who returned the questionnaires intended to accept pre-pandemic H1N1 vaccination.
In a separate article, very few of 85 focus group participants in British Columbia said they would be willing to be vaccinated in the event of a pandemic, and very few people said they or their children would definitely get vaccinated.
The most common reason for refusal was potential side effects, followed by questions about the vaccine's efficacy.