Abstract
Vaccination rates in Italy fell until 2015 because of unfounded safety concerns. Public education and a 2017 law on mandatory vaccination have boosted rates since then. The aim of our study is to explore how trust in the scientific community and attitudes towards vaccines have changed in the period of 2017–2019 in Italy. Data were extracted from the Italian section of the 2017 and 2019 editions of the European Social Survey (ESS). We compared the two surveys highlighting changes in public opinion on vaccines. A descriptive analysis of the socio-cultural variables according to the answers provided to key questions on the harmfulness of vaccines was conducted. Differences between percentages were tested by using the χ2 test. The association between the opinion about the harmfulness of vaccines and trust in the scientific community was analyzed through a logistic regression model. Compared to ESS8, ESS9 showed an increase in the percentage of respondents disagreeing with the harmfulness of vaccines. Trust in the scientific community raised in the period from 2017 to 2019 (59% vs. 69.6%). Higher education was significantly associated with disagreement regarding the harmfulness of vaccines (odds ratio (OR) = 2.41; 95% confidence interval (95%CI) 1.75–3.31), the strongest predictor was trust in the scientific community (OR = 10.47; 95% CI 7.55–14.52). In Italy, trust in the scientific community and in vaccinations has grown significantly in recent years, indicating a paradigm shift in public opinion compared to the past. Central actions and effective public communication strategies might reduce vaccine hesitancy and could be essential to garner public trust.
Highlights
Vaccines are widely recognised by health authorities and the medical community as a major tool for achieving public health benefits in terms of the prevention of infectious diseases, with a typical example being the eradication of smallpox in 1980 [1,2]
We showed that when the Italian population is stratified on the basis of their attitude towards vaccination, those with anti-vax attitudes and who are skeptical towards the scientific community are mainly older males with low participation in political and cultural life and who are politically oriented to the right, whereas individuals who identify as being pro-vax/pro-science are represented by females with a certain level of involvement in political and cultural life and who are politically oriented to the left [8]
Our findings indicated that the factors that were mostly associated with disagreement regarding the harmfulness of vaccines were higher education and, above all, trust in the scientific community
Summary
Vaccines are widely recognised by health authorities and the medical community as a major tool for achieving public health benefits in terms of the prevention of infectious diseases, with a typical example being the eradication of smallpox in 1980 [1,2]. For many individuals, the demonstrated benefits of vaccines are not sufficient to embrace vaccination whole-heartedly. These individuals doubt the value of vaccines, worry over their safety, and question the actual need for them, an attitude called vaccine hesitancy. With this term, we refer to the “delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccination services” [3], and it differs from what we call “vaccine refusal”, given that even those who get willingly vaccinated can harbour hesitancy towards certain aspects of vaccination [4]. In its recent recommendations to strengthen European Union cooperation on vaccine-preventable diseases, the European
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