Abstract
Vaccine hesitancy is a major contemporary threat to global health leading to the delay or refusal of vaccines. Quantitative studies on vaccination attitudes generally state that vaccine hesitancy is higher among immigrants. However, qualitative studies show a spectrum of vaccinerelated attitudes and behaviours among immigrant parents, from refusal over delay to acceptance of all childhood vaccines. This paper is based on a 2020 qualitative study among Serbian parents living in the Netherlands. It discusses childhood vaccine compliance, focusing on parents with at least one fully vaccinated child. In general, the Serbian parents interviewed made decisions relating to vaccination based on their sociocultural background (ie, viewing vaccines as a part of ’traditional’ upbringing), intersubjective norms (ie, they trust the state, vaccines, health officials, peers) or they lack sufficient language proficiency or information regarding vaccines. More importantly, the results also show that some participants exhibit vaccine hesitancy because they do not trust the vaccines, the government, health officials or pharmaceutical companies. The intriguing results confirm that vaccine hesitancy does occur among both the highly educated and lower educated, informed and uninformed, as well as users of complementary medicine and the religious (here, Serbian Orthodox Christian) and nonreligious. Thus, this study interprets contemporary vaccine hesitancy as a rational response among vaccineaccepting parents to live in a posttrust world burdened by regulatory scandals, scientific pluralism and the availability of alternative information. Consequently, the study indicates that contemporary vaccine hesitancy requires understanding as a contemporary ’risk management strategy’ outside of contextual, individual/group and vaccinerelated factors. At that moment, when I vaccinated my child, I didn’t even think about it. Now, I think [about it] a bit more (…). Probably, if people read [instructions for use], a good deal of them would not even want to vaccinate children because every medicine has contraindications. (…) If I’d read it then, I might have had more questions, but I didn’t (…). But, it’s OK that my husband didn’t think about it. He’s a musician. But I am a scientist, a pharmacist and a chemist. I didn’t think about it at all! That moment when a child is small, a baby, that’s [vaccination] not the most important thing in my life. That’s only one of the things that needs to be done, it’s on the list and that’s it. (…) I would probably vaccinate my child according to the schedule anyway, but I think I was supposed to know (a Serbian Orthodox churchgoer and a mother of a 7- year old child married to a Dutch man, the Netherlands).