Vaccine skeptics’ storytelling helps inaccurate claims spread, researcher says
Katherine Shwetz argues vaccine hesitancy persists because personal stories can outmatch fact sheets, even when the medicine is wrong.
By Priya Raghavan · Science Reporter
3 min read
Vaccine skeptics’ storytelling gives medically inaccurate claims emotional force that public health fact sheets often struggle to match, medical humanities researcher Katherine Shwetz writes in The Conversation. Her analysis matters because it frames vaccine hesitancy less as a lack of information than as a set of stories tied to fear, identity and trust.
Shwetz, who studies how vaccine-hesitant groups shape their messages, argues that opponents of vaccination have more freedom than public health agencies in the kinds of narratives they can use. Scientific messages, she writes, must reflect the complexity and limits of evidence, while vaccine-skeptic narratives can present sharper conflict, clearer villains and more dramatic consequences.
Vaccine hesitancy has a long history, Shwetz notes. She points to 19th-century resistance to mandatory smallpox vaccination in England and to U.S. organizations such as the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League of Brooklyn, founded in 1894, as earlier examples of organized opposition.
How do vaccine skeptics use storytelling?
Shwetz says vaccine-hesitant groups often build stories around patients who feel ignored by doctors or parents who connect a child’s health problems to vaccination. Those stories can be powerful even when they do not accurately describe medical risk or scientific evidence.
In her analysis, vaccines can become symbols for broader worries that are not strictly medical. A vaccine refusal story may stand for resistance to government authority, personal autonomy or psychological strength, rather than a direct claim about how a vaccine works in the body.
That symbolic use helps explain why more scientific detail does not necessarily change minds, according to Shwetz. She writes that the common “information deficit” view — the idea that hesitancy stems mainly from poor knowledge — has had limited success as a public health strategy.
Shwetz cites research showing that people who delay or refuse vaccines do not fit one profile. Vaccine-hesitant people can include those with higher education levels and strong health literacy, as well as people whose views are shaped by distrust of medicine, criticism of government, religious beliefs, parental concern or a desire for social belonging.
What is vaccine hesitancy?
Researchers generally use vaccine hesitancy to describe delaying or refusing some or all vaccines despite standard medical recommendations, Shwetz writes. It is considered difficult to address because it can involve misinformation, personal experience, group identity and distrust of institutions at the same time.
Shwetz also connects current U.S. vaccine politics to these storytelling patterns. She writes that under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has begun using language that resembles vaccine-hesitant framing.
As an example, she cites a CDC announcement about changes to the childhood vaccine schedule that described the approach as “individual-based decision-making.” She also points to Kirk Milhoan, the Kennedy-appointed head of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, describing vaccine debates as a question of “autonomy versus public health.”
That kind of framing, Shwetz argues, can shift attention from physical medical risks to themes of individuality and threat. In that story, vaccines appear as a challenge to the self rather than as preventive medical tools.
Shwetz writes that dismissing vaccine-hesitant people can make the problem harder to understand. She notes that some marginalized groups have reason to distrust medical institutions, including Black Americans whose skepticism may be shaped by forced medical experimentation and systemic discrimination.
Some public health and communication researchers are responding by studying the literary features of vaccine-hesitant messages, including symbolism and narrative structure, according to Shwetz. She argues that identifying those techniques, while taking people’s experiences seriously, may offer a more respectful way to address vaccine concerns.
This story draws on original reporting from Medical Xpress.