IMAGINESTOCK
As of early March, 2025, over 250 cases of measles and similar diseases have been recorded in western Texas alone, with one notable death having occurred: an unvaccinated, otherwise healthy six-year-old girl.
Her passing was tragic, but undoubtedly preventable if her parents had put aside their anti-vaccination beliefs – meaning that for the more than 14 million similarly unvaccinated children throughout the United States, contracting a deadly disease is a major concern. With the World Health Organization recently having named vaccine hesitancy in their top ten threats to global health, analyzing the causes of anti-vaccination beliefs is now more pivotal than ever.
Safety concerns regarding potential toxins within vaccines are now the leading cause of a lack of confidence in their performance. For instance, the Oxford University’s Centre for Clinical Vaccinology and Tropical Medicine asserts that formaldehyde and aluminum can be found in vaccines in quantities as low as one thousandth of a gram, two ingredients that many parents are concerned about. According to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, however, the amount of these ingredients found in vaccines is highly safe for the human body, with normal metabolic functioning producing more formaldehyde than is found in any vaccine given to children. Despite the reassurance of much modern research, many uninformed parents believe that these vaccine components will be a detriment to the health of their children.
Many parents also delay vaccines for their children out of the belief that there are too few cases of many diseases reported in recent years to warrant the vaccinations that prevent them. Ironically, these diseases are no longer a major health concern because most children have been vaccinated against them for many decades.
For example, the polio vaccine mitigated deaths by up to 90% when it was first introduced in 1955. Although the disease has been almost entirely eradicated since, vaccine hesitancy and other causes have allowed it to remain in Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to the World Health Organization. This highlights how any anti-vaccination justification that relies on the ‘non-existence’ of deadly diseases to advocate vaccine abstinence is mistaken.
These uneducated opinions are often spread via social media platforms, which expands the epidemic of harmful anti-vaccination beliefs among parents. In fact, research done by University of Washington student Rachel E. Moran suggests that some social media influencers monetize their vaccine hesitancy by sharing over-dramatized and uninformed opinions disguised as informative content. Parents who are followers of these unreputable influencers tend to adopt the same dangerous beliefs, heightening the proliferation of anti-vaccination sentiment.
Over the last six years, UNICEF has reported that 80% of people report less confidence in vaccine efficacy for children in as many as 55 countries. This concerning development, rooted in the rapid adoption of misinformed anti-vaccination beliefs spread through social media, has led the millions of unvaccinated children in the United States to increase in number each year.
Now more than ever, it is important to remember that modern healthcare and decades worth of medical research cannot be disproved by the uneducated content of a social media influencer.