Anti-Vaxxer Sympathy

[Aractus]

Anyway, what exactly is your point?  It sounds like you are defending anti-vaxxers by listing these barriers, but not giving us any ideas of how to address those issues (and also, no, not everyone has those issues.  Actually, statistically speaking, here in Oregon at least, many of those who opt out for non-medical reason are middle class and up, not poor, have plenty of education AND access to whatever health care they would like). So the whole local wizard thing isn't it.  

I swear to you, some people do it because it's the cool fad.  I can share some FB posts with you from some of my "friends", who are clearly not vaccinating, because it's cool to be all anti-establishment.

I'm not "defending" anyone. I'm simply explaining to you that failure to deliver health service outcomes is never the fault of the patients. That point of view is not tolerated in healthcare today - it's akin to assimilation and all it does is drive people who already have a reason not to seek out health services further away from accessing the services they need.

Let me put this in perspective for you - just because someone fails to respond to one health service does not mean you want to alienate them from other necessary health services. I could list a whole bunch of services that people routinely fail to accept that are all equally as important as childhood immunisation (in fact probably more important because the services I'm thinking of have a direct link to early mortality and life expectancy whereas individual immunisation does not).

Aroura - it doesn't matter what their reason is. If their reason is that it's "a cool fad" and that is the genuine reason, then health services should be looking to ways to engage with those people in order to deliver the health services and health outcomes that are desired. You can't just ignore them, call them dumb, and expect them to convert to a different way of thinking.

Forcing health services on people is never the right thing. Yes forcing education is one important tool (e.g. parents can only access government payments if they take a parenting course); but as soon as you start forcing health services you will drive people away from receiving needed health services in the future. Yes they will get the service that you've forced on them (in this case childhood immunisation), but they will not go back to the healthcare system when their child has another medical need since their experience with the health system is they are forced to do things against their will.