Vaccines: What’s Most Important?

New research published in The Lancet (de Figueiredo et al. 2020) has found that, between 2015 and 2019, vaccine confidence remained low across Europe compared with other continents. Meanwhile, trust in the importance, effectiveness and safety of vaccines plummeted in Afghanistan, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines and South Korea during the same period.

“Confidence in the importance of vaccines (rather than in their safety or effectiveness) had the strongest univariate association with vaccine uptake compared with other determinants considered,” according to the study led by experts with the Vaccine Confidence Project (VCP).

Launched in 2010, the VCP provides a systematic approach of monitoring public confidence in immunisation programmes across the globe. The group continuously researches the causes and trends impacting vaccine confidence at national and global levels. Their findings help to inform policy and trust-building activities for improving immunisation programmes.

In this latest study, the VCP was able to estimate and map vaccine confidence for 149 countries from 2015 to 2019. The study used new and existing VCI surveys comprising nearly 300,000 individual responses from those countries. Bayesian tools enabled study authors to determine the link between vaccine uptake and socioeconomic and non-socioeconomic determinants (e.g. confidence in vaccine, trust in health system) in each country.