Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start--and Why They Don't Go Away

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 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.

Table of Contents:
Prologue Chapter One: An Overview Chapter Two: The psychology of crowds Chapter Three: On freedom of choice and voice Chapter Four: On risks, rumors, and the contagion of panic Chapter Five: Back to Nature Conclusion: Missing the Point

About the Author :
HEIDI J. LARSON, PhD, is Professor of Anthropology, Risk, and Decision Science and Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine; she holds a concurrent position as Clinical Professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the University of Washington. She was previously an Associate Professor in International Development at Clark University and a Research Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health's Center for Population and Development Studies. Dr. Larson was named one of The BCC's Top 100 Women of 2021 for her work on vaccine confidence.

Review :
In Stuck, anthropologist Heidi Larson explains why debunking vaccine misinformation with logic, reason, and scientific facts are not nearly enough. By viewing vaccine refusal as a cultural movement, Larson explains how it is only through understanding the root causes of false beliefs about vaccines that we can begin to change them. A compelling guide on how to treat the disease and not the symptoms. Vaccine hesitancy has emerged as a major 21st-century public health threat, resulting in declines in vaccine coverage and the return of serious or even deadly infections such as measles or pertussis. Now more than ever we have to be concerned about the impact of misinformation and rumors on the acceptance of new vaccines for these conditions. Heidi Larson's book provides important insights to help us navigate these difficulties. Heidi Larson's excellent new book looks at why vaccine rumors cannot simply be put to rest with more evidence and debunking. As she compellingly argues, emotions and sentiments take on lives of their own, spreading between sympathetic individuals and propagating. Fear, mistrust, and anger all play key roles in vaccine denialism, and to ignore these factors is to badly misdiagnose why people do not vaccinate. To change the denier, Larson argues, one must change the ecosystem of doubt and mistrust they live in.