2025-01-24
11 分钟As trust in medicine declines and vaccine hesitancy spreads, doctors are changing how they talk about lifesaving childhood shots.
Melinda I'm Melinda Wenner Moyer, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times.
I cover science and health.
I've also written extensively about vaccines and vaccine hesitancy.
It used to be
that there were so many deadly and really dangerous infections that spread among kids around the country.
Measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, polio.
We have vaccines against all of these diseases.
Now there are laws in all 50 states requiring
that children entering kindergarten receive vaccines against these very deadly diseases to keep them safe.
Since the COVID 19 pandemic, there have been a lot of parents asking more and more questions about vaccines,
asking should I trust my doctor?
Should I trust the medical establishment?
And all of these things together led to a surge in vaccine hesitancy.
So for the story that I'm going to read for you,
I talked to six pediatricians across the country because I was really interested in understanding their perspective and what they were encountering every day as they met with parents and patients.
I wanted to know
if they felt equipped to deal with the rise in vaccine hesitancy that they were seeing.
And two big things stood out to me.
One of the big tensions is that pediatricians really wanted to spend as much time as possible with parents who were vaccine hesitant,
but they have very busy schedules, often seeing dozens of patients a day.