How Could Digital Tools Help Fight Against Anti-Vaccination?

We strongly believe that only digital health can bring healthcare into the 21st century and make patients the point-of-care.

Anti-vaccination (anti-vax) movements lure increasingly more people into skipping potentially life-saving immunisation against infectious diseases, such as measles, mumps, or rubella; highly impairing herd immunity for entire communities. You might have encountered such sentiments on social media, but people living a century before also experienced similar resistance to vaccines during the smallpox vaccination effort. Such objection in 1920 prompted Seattle’s commissioner of public health to call the city “a hotbed for anti-vaccination, Christian Science, and various anti-medical cults, and it is difficult to enforce vaccination.”

Even in times of a pandemic, anti-vaxxers’ activism does not falter. According to a December survey by Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), 27% of Americans say they probably or definitely would not get a COVID-19 vaccine; even if it were free and deemed safe by scientists. This trend can prove devastating if we consider the impact of similar resistance in recent years. For example, measles led to some 140,000 worldwide deaths in 2018, while Q1 2019 saw a 300% rise in measles cases compared to the same period a year before. Among the reasons, the WHO cites vaccine hesitancy.