Last year, the World Health Organization named vaccine hesitancy one of the top health threats. This year, a pandemic. Like its predecessors SARS, Ebola and H1N1, experts say the novel coronavirus outbreak should serve to underscore the importance of vaccines.
So it’s understandable, then, that eyes have turned towards the anti-vaxxer community to see how they’re responding to COVID-19, which has shuttered entire countries and infected upwards of two million people around the world.
So far the response has been predictable if surprisingly quick to materialize, says Dr. Timothy Caulfield, research director at the University of Alberta’s Health Law Institute and author of The Vaccination Picture.