Hesitancy to public health programming and policy results in costly delays and undermines effectiveness. Hesitancy is presumed to stem from ignorance. This is based on the assumptions that the science of medicine is static and that scientific evidence holds greatest weight in individual health decisions. Neither are true.
Hesitancy reminds us that the human condition is complex and that decisions are motivated by a dynamic interplay of individual and shared experiences. Hesitancy should be viewed as pushing scientific discovery forward.
Hesitancy serves as a form of advocacy calling for improvements and expanded access to basic public services, including health care delivery and infrastructure.
On this website you will find:
Case Studies: An expanding collection of contemporary case studies that evidence sociocultural, economic, political, geographic, and historic factors that inform behaviors and provoke resistance. For each case study, a curated collection of literature from different fields is presented.
Dialogue: Scholars with expertise in the field reflect on the issues, considering the nature of the hesitancy in each case and offering thoughts on how this case informs the larger conversation to prevent resistance.
“We underinvested in research on human behavior.
I never imagined a year ago, when those [COVID-19] vaccines were just proving to be fantastically safe and effective, that we would still have 60 million people who had not taken advantage of them because of misinformation and disinformation that somehow dominated all of the ways in which people were getting their answers.
And a lot of those answers were, in fact, false. And we have lost so much as a result of that.”
— Francis Collins, MD, Former Director NIH