Vaccine Hesitancy in the Current Landscape of the COVID-19 Pandemic

For a procedure so commonplace in a doctor’s office, so critical to the prevention of disease, and so marred by controversy, it seemed odd that in my third year of medical school, I had yet to perform a vaccination. For that reason, I was very excited for my first rotation in family medicine. One could even say I was a little overzealous to learn about vaccines. To my credit, as someone who studied healthcare economics, there is a lot to love about the social return on investment of vaccines. Two weeks into my rotation I came across my first case of vaccine hesitancy. They were parents who had immigrated to Canada and were skeptical of vaccines. They wanted to pick and choose which vaccines their child would receive. These people are called the ‘vaccine hesitant’ and, unlike the devout ‘vaccine deniers’, they are the crucial swing states in a political battle for the health of our country. [1