COLUMBUS, Ohio – In the face of a measles outbreak traced to Disney theme parks in California and renewed discussion of the risks and benefits of childhood vaccinations, researchers at Ohio State say trust in government may affect the public’s willingness to get vaccinated against diseases like measles and the flu.
As the California-related outbreak exceeds 100 cases, a survey by a health insurance company found that — in the past two years, immunization coverage among young children in Ohio dropped by 17 percent. The rate of immunization among kids 19 months to 3 years old dropped from 74.7 percent to 61.7 percent, according to UnitedHealthcare’s annual “America’s Health Rankings.”
An analysis of the Pew Research for the People and Press survey from October 2009, during a worldwide pandemic of the H1N1 swine flu indicated that the more confident people are in government, the more likely they are to get vaccinations, OSU sociology professor Kent Schwirian said.
The study of people’s views during the outbreak found that people who trusted the government’s ability to handle the outbreak were almost three time as likely to get a flu shot as those who didn’t, Shwirian said.
Schwirian conducted the study with Gustavo Mesch, a Ph.D. graduate of Ohio State who is now a professor of sociology and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Haifa in Israel. Their results appear online in the journal Health Promotion International.
The World Health Organization declared the 2009-10 outbreak the first worldwide pandemic in more than 40 years, Shwirian said. The virus killed 12,500, hospitalized 275,000 and sickened 61 million in the United States alone, he said.
The vaccination program became controversial and the number of people who said they would get the vaccine plummeted, Shwirian said. According to his research, nearly 60 percent of those with confidence in government were willing to take the vaccine, compared to 32 percent of those with less confidence.