How Does Understanding of Vaccinations Affect Opinions?

Vaccination is widely recognised as one of the most important achievements in modern public health, having significantly reduced the spread of many infectious diseases and, in some cases, eliminated them entirely. Despite this, vaccine hesitancy remains a challenge in many countries, including the UK. This raises an important question: how well do people actually understand vaccines, and how does this level of understanding influence their decisions? While vaccines are strongly supported by scientific evidence, public attitudes towards them vary widely. This suggests that vaccine hesitancy may not simply be the result of rejecting science, but instead linked to differences in health education, access to reliable information, and the ability to interpret medical evidence. To provide my own evidence, I have conducted a short questionnaire.

First of all, I would like to give advantages and disadvantages of my sample. To avoid social desirability, I made my questionnaire fully anonymous and gained consent before asking questions to process data. My questions covered knowledge, demographics, attitudes and behavioural influences. Collecting this data can support my research on how educated people are on vaccinations. To engage my participants I ensured the questionnaire was short, yet informative to me, and also included an open ended question to provide myself some qualitative data if people chose to share personal opinions. Disadvantages of my research mostly come from my sample; it only consisted of 160 participants, may be ethnocentric to only Teeside and 91.3% were from ages 16-18. This means my sample isn’t representative and may have researcher bias due to the majority of who participated being within my age group due to who it was sent too. Nevertheless, I take pride in how many people this survey has been taken by especially taking into account my age.

A topic that has come up in recent years, is misinformation on social media, especially with its upcoming growth. Unlike information provided by healthcare, content on social media is not always verified and may contain inaccurate claims. Additionally, it is difficult for viewers to distinguish reliable sources from unreliable ones. Despite this, verified public health organisations such as NHS and WHO can promote vaccinations in an accessible way. Common misconceptions can be presented in a short, engaging post which can reach large audiences. In my survey, 43.8% of participants receive their information about vaccinations from social media. This suggests that social media plays a significant role in understanding of vaccines, particularly among younger age groups who use these platforms frequently. However the majority of participants had chose schools and colleges (76.3%) as their source of vaccination information. I have interpreted this in two ways. From personal experience, we did learn about vaccinations and herd immunity as part of the specification in secondary school. Also, educational institutions send out emails and messages to facilitate vaccinations and spread awareness. 

This question was included because health related decisions are often based on, not only by scientific evidence, but also by the views of family members, friends and wider communities. People are more likely to trust information from individuals they know personally, particularly when discussing topics related to health and safety. This means that positive opinions about vaccination may encourage vaccine uptake, while negative opinions may contribute to hesitancy. The results suggest that social influence can play an important role in shaping attitudes towards vaccination, highlighting that vaccine decisions are often influenced by interpersonal relationships as well as medical information. Overall the results were very mixed, but the majority was “Yes, encouraged me.”  This data shows that vaccinations are accepted by the majority, which also provides evidence for herd immunity. 

As shown above, the questions assessed understanding of the purpose of vaccines and their role in protecting both individuals and the wider community. General knowledge is important because an individual’s attitude towards vaccination may be influenced by their understanding of how vaccines work and why they are used. A stronger understanding of vaccination can increase trust in vaccine programmes, whereas gaps in knowledge could make individuals more vulnerable to misconceptions or misleading information. For the questions, 87% - 89% answered true. This was comforting to see that my participants had a general understanding of vaccinations leading to educated choices no matter their decision.

Additionally, I assessed opinions on vaccinations as both qualitative and quantitive data. Beginning with the quantitive data, it can be concluded that people generally have a good attitude towards vaccination and its impact on public health. The majority of participants gave vaccines 4 or 5 points out of five regarding their importance. In addition, more than half of the surveyed 52.5% gave vaccines the highest possible mark of 5 out of 5. The level of confidence in the reliability of the information about vaccines was relatively average; the largest share of respondents gave 3 out of 5 points. While 38.1% of people were confident enough and gave 4 or 5 points, 28.8% of them were rather sceptical of the provided information. Nevertheless, an overwhelming number of people, which makes up 85.6%, believe that vaccines are responsible for decreasing the number of diseases across the globe. Only a very small amount of people disagrees with this statement.

Finally, I would like to discuss qualitative data. As part of my survey it wasnt required like the other questions, however I did gain 64 responses. The question was “what are your honest thoughts on vaccines.” 

I think most vaccinations should be mandatory as it can reduce the severity of pandemics and epidemics. Also because people can be prevented from suffering life long implications because of a disease which can be easily prevented with a vaccine. However i do believe that it takes alot of trial and error to perfect a vaccine and ensure there are no complications resulting from the vaccine. 

“I think that vaccinations are very important for public health because they help to avoid diseases and they avoid infection between two or more people.”

“Vaccines help prevent you getting serious illnesses and help reduce the risk of getting them”

“Vaccines are tested in multiple stages on humans to make sure they are as safe and effective as possible before being widely used, and they continue to be monitored after approval. Like all medical treatments, they aren’t completely risk-free, but serious side effects are rare and the benefits are weighed against those risks. While no medicine is perfect, vaccines go through strict testing and oversight rather than being released without understanding their effects”

These are a few of the many responses which agree with vaccines however accept there may be  risks and side effects. What I found particularly interesting was multiple responses speaking about how we never needed these modern treatments as in the past and also survived. To counter this, I would say that life expectancy from a century ago in the UK has more than doubled. This is due to vaccinations, treatments, education and cures to diseases and there is scientific evidence for this. 

In conclusion, most people are for vaccinations however the few that aren’t seem to lack trust in the government and science. This can be overcome by educating people about the science behind, and also building trust.