How effective was the messaging regarding vaccine safety?
U.S. officials did an extremely good job of acknowledging that there were widespread doubts about the safety of the swine flu vaccine. They wisely refrained from pushing too hard. Vaccination was voluntary, not required; people were urged to make up their own minds, and were given “permission” to watch and wait until they felt sufficiently confident that no serious vaccine safety problems had emerged. (The comparative mildness of the pandemic and the delay in vaccine availability made this an easy decision.) We never felt that officials were implying it was foolish to worry about the safety of the vaccine. Officials said the vaccine was safe, but they didn’t say worrying about it was stupid. Officials also developed an impressive program to track claims of adverse events and to assess whether there were more such claims than could be accounted for by coincidence. These confidence-building measures were aimed more at physicians and the general public than at anti-vaccination activists.
