As clashing politicians appear in media stories about vaccines, a new study shows that coverage of these controversies stokes partisanship and undermines faith in life-saving advice from doctors and public officials.
Today, researchers released a new Scholars Strategy Network brief summarizing major findings on two recent, widely publicized cases of political disputes about public health questions.
The researchers, Erika Franklin Fowler an Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, and Sarah Elizabeth Gollust an Assistant Professor of Public Health in the Division of Health Policy and Management at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health examined the 2009 dust-up over mammography screenings and the 2006-07 fights over whether middle-school girls should be required to be vaccinated against infections by the human papilloma virus. This research draws on experimental results along with evidence about trends in media coverage, with results fully reported in a just-released March 2015 article in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
In the researchers' experiments, according to their brief, "Participants who were newly exposed to stories about political conflicts concerning human papillomavirus vaccination became less supportive of vaccines in general – suggesting that something similar could flow from current media coverage of political arguments about measles vaccination. In addition, higher levels of media coverage of political conflict were associated with lower trust in government and doctors."
Fowler and Gollust wrote, "Vaccines only work to prevent dread diseases when almost everyone is vaccinated. Our research on news publicity about political disputes suggests that American society could be on a slippery slope toward distrust of public health recommendations and unwillingness to accept vaccination, with potentially concerning consequences not just for convinced hard-core opponents but for everyone."