MISSED OPPORTUNITY

Eurobarometer has published  the final report of a survey on Europeans’ attitudes towards vaccination. The survey commissioned by the European Commission, Directorate General for Health and Food Safety (DG SANTE) involved 27,524 respondents from the 28 EU Member States and was carried out between the 15th and 29th of March 2019. The report as well as annexes can be find at http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm/survey/getsurveydetail/instruments/special/surveyky/2223.   The main findings of the survey have been reported by the press and it is not worth reporting them again. In a nutshell, the conclusion of this exercise is that most European citizens (85%) think that vaccines are effective but almost half of them (48%) believe that they can have serious side effects as well. Other findings are more obvious and add very little to what we already know about vaccine hesitancy. Said so, this study deserves two comments and one consideration. The first comment concerns vaccine effectiveness. Most people think that vaccine are effective. Anti-vaccine activists challenge vaccine effectiveness but they are a small minority. When people hesitate to vaccinate, it is not because they think vaccine are ineffective but because they think that infectious diseases are not so  dangerous in comparison to vaccine potential side effects. The second comment concerns the gap between what people think of vaccine and what they actually do. They say that vaccines are beneficial, but they neglect vaccination. Why? Because  they don’t think that  infectious diseases are an issue for them. Enlightening too much vaccine merits in defeating  infections can have the collateral effect to over reassure people and, paradoxically, it could jeopardize vaccination campaigns. The final consideration is about the survey itself.  Questions suffer for being decontextualized, they have been posed in March 2019, but could have been posed one, two, or ten years ago. There is no link with the present, no reference to current problems and debate on vaccine  and vaccination. This  survey missed the opportunity to provide a real time picture and this is a damage.