As surprising as it is that many parents in the United States still have doubts about vaccines, despite the overwhelming evidence of their efficacy and safety, a recent survey of doctors has discovered a frightening trend: It s not only parents who hold mistaken beliefs about vaccines; it s their doctors, too especially the younger ones.
In a survey of 551 healthcare providers, doctors were supportive of childhood vaccination by an overwhelming margin. While this is certainly no surprise, other results are, in fact, both surprising and disturbing: Only 81 percent of these physicians agreed that vaccines are one of the safest types of medicine, and 89 percent believed that vaccines are becoming safer and more effective. Considering the enormous amount of evidence demonstrating the efficacy and safety of vaccines, ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan asks, Why isn t this 100 percent? Even more disconcerting, the more recent the doctor s graduation from medical school, the less likely he or she was to agree with either of these statements, or to consider vaccines to be highly effective overall.
One of the study s authors believes that the fact that we now see few to no cases of the diseases that these vaccines target has made these illnesses less visible. Doctors are forgetting how devastating illnesses such as polio or measles can be, and may end up hearing more about the public's vaccine safety fears than about the actual illnesses the vaccines are designed to prevent. Concerned about the vulnerability of doctors to media scares, as well as their lack of familiarity with the history of these dangerous illnesses, ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross says, These doctors should not be influenced by the public outcry. They should be the ones who are influencing the public.
Considering how important a doctor s opinion is when a parent decides whether to vaccinate a child, it is worrisome that younger generations of doctors may be growing less supportive of vaccination. As ACSH s Dr. Ruth Kava observes, Doctors often want to please their patients. If both the parent and the doctor already have concerns about the importance of vaccines, the doctor may be less likely to encourage that parent to vaccinate the child. This trend has the potential to decrease child vaccination rates, which would pose a serious threat to America s public health.
