Vaccine reluctance and refusal are no longer limited to the margins of society. Debates around vaccines’ necessity -along with questions around their side effects – have gone mainstream, blending with geopolitical conflicts, political campaigns, celebrity causes, and “natural” lifestyles to win a growing number of hearts and minds. Today’s anti-vaccine positions find audiences where they’ve never existed previously.
Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start–and Why They Don’t Go Away (Oxford UP, 2020) examines how the issues surrounding vaccine hesitancy are, more than anything, about people feeling left out of the conversation. A new dialogue is long overdue, one that addresses the many types of vaccine hesitancy and the social factors that perpetuate them. To do this, Stuck provides a clear-eyed examination of the social vectors that transmit vaccine rumors, their manifestations around the globe, and how these individual threads are all connected.
In this interview with the New Book Network, author and Professor Heidi J. Larson discusses the research that informed the book, and how things have changed since the COVID-19 pandemic.
