The continuum of vaccine confidence

🤔 How does your target community think about vaccines?

🤔 What do the people you're trying to reach think about vaccines?

🤔 Do they hesitate about vaccines, refuse all vaccines or actively demand them?

Vaccine hesitancy:

• Manifests as a continuum ranging from demand and acceptance, to hesitancy, to refusal of vaccines.
• Is driven by a complex array of context-specific factors, including religion, politics and trust in government institutions.
• Individual-level factors, like education level, knowledge of vaccines, experiences with vaccination and community norms around vaccination, can also influence vaccination attitudes and decisions.

The continuum of vaccine hesitancy and demand

People who are hesitant about vaccines may vaccinate anyway, may delay vaccination or may refuse one vaccine. People who accept all vaccines may be influenced by disinformation or loss of trust in health services and slide to the hesitancy end of the continuum.

💡 Increasing vaccine coverage is not as simple as educating people about the benefits of vaccination.

✅ Providing information or reminders on the eligibility, access and affordability of vaccines

✅ Reminding people why we vaccinate

✅ Increasing the salience of a disease, paired with messages that increase self-efficacy and response efficacy (the awareness of and ability to adopt an appropriate protection in response )

✅ Using “verbal defaults” to frame immunization as a routine act (once the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine have been established)

✅ Addressing common questions or new concerns about vaccination

✅ Countering mis/disinformation about vaccines