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.
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.