This piece explores legal, ethical, and policy arguments associated with using interventions that leverage feelings of shame and social exclusion to promote uptake of childhood immunizations by parents.
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References
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As discussed infra, we use the term “shaming” to avoid conclusively characterizing efforts by policymakers, public officials, or private parties to create or reinforce social norms against vaccine refusal as “stigmatization.”
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The goal of vaccine communication efforts is to instill and maintain confidence in the recommended preventive care guidelines, and while experts prefer focusing on describing the population in terms of these goals, rather than using a label like “vaccine hesitant,” which focuses on the presence of a perceived negative characteristic, the term “vaccine hesitant” will be used periodically in this paper to describe the population to whom outreach is focused. See National Vaccine Advisory Committee, “Assessing the State of Vaccine Confidence in the United States: Recommendations from the National Vaccine Advisory Committee,”Public Health Reports130 no. 6, (Nov.-Dec. 2015): 573–595.
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