Immunity takes two weeks to develop after receiving the vaccination, so students attending in the fall are encouraged to get their booster shot now.
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“It’s more effective to accentuate the positive reasons to vaccinate and take a nonconfrontational approach… than directly trying to counter” anti-vaccine perceptions, explained Keith Holyoak of the University of California Los Angeles, a senior author of the study.
The anti-vaccination movement gained steam in 1998, when a study about 12 children published in The Lancetstated there was a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine to autism onset. This time around, researchers tried a different approach.
Cataracts in the eyes of a child with congenital Rubella syndrome, a preventable disease.
With a mumps outbreak continuing to increase, University of Illinois students are being advised to get a booster shot of the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine as soon as possible, even if they’ve already had two doses.
Many people who are skeptical about vaccinating their children can be convinced to do so, but only if the argument is presented in a certain way, a team of psychologists from UCLA and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reported today.
In the new study, the researchers asked 315 people questions to examine their views on several potentially controversial subjects, including their attitudes toward vaccines and their willingness to vaccinate their kids.
The best ways to convince people of the benefits of vaccinations may be to show them pictures of a child with measles or to have them read a description of the disease written by a mom whose child was infected, according to a new study. Of those who were skeptical, 10% had very negative attitudes on vaccination.
Among group members who were sceptical about or very opposed to vaccines, the last approach substantially increased support for vaccination, said the researchers. One group received a parent’s description of what it was like to have a child with measles, warnings about the importance of vaccination, and photos of a child covered with measles and rubella rashes, or a young boy’s face horribly swollen by mumps.
The outcome was the same for the control group, whose members read an unrelated statement about feeding birds.
He said the underlying reasons behind immunisation sometimes got forgotten during the “polarising debate on whether the vaccine has side effects”. “That’s also what doctors want”.
The study has broader implications for persuading skeptics on a wide range of issues. Fighting a misconception head-on seldom changes minds, said Holyoak, who conducts research on learning, reasoning, knowledge and creativity.
“Try not to be directly confrontational”, Holyoak said.
“Some people might not appreciate how unsafe diseases like measles can be because [the diseases] are not something that many people have experienced firsthand”, Powell said. “They’re persuadable by the positive argument, but not by the head-on attack”, he said.
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Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College, who did the Pediatrics study, said in an e-mail that the new work was encouraging, but that future research should focus on what the differences were between the two studies. “They were the same at pre-test and were affected in exactly the same way”, Powell said. But researchers say they have found a way to overcome some of the most entrenched anti-vaccine attitudes: Remind the skeptics, with words and images, why vaccines exist.
