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The COVID-19 pandemic has lasted more than a year, but hope is here in the form of multiple safe and effective vaccines authorized for emergency use. Millions are now being vaccinated, but as vaccine supply continues to increase throughout 2021, a hurdle health experts anticipate eventually is a lack of public demand. That is, how do health care providers address vaccine hesitancy when it’s critical for the greater good that enough of the population is vaccinated to reach herd immunity?
To Greg Poland, M.D., an infectious diseases expert and head of Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group, the answer comes down to one word: Listening.
“In the spirit of seeking the root-cause issue, we need to stop asking why people don’t understand what we are telling them and consider asking why we don’t understand them,” Dr. Poland and colleagues write in a recent editorial in the scientific journal Vaccine. “For many patients, health care providers are no longer considered to be the exclusive expert in health decisions.”
The research was supported in part by the Mayo Clinic Robert D. and Patricia E. Kern Center for the Science of Health Care Delivery.
Read the rest of the article on Advancing the Science.
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Other Mayo Clinic medical research websites:
- Research at Mayo Clinic
- Discovery’s Edge
- Forefront
- Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine
- Center for Regenerative Medicine
- Center for the Science of Health Care Delivery
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Information in this post was accurate at the time of its posting. Due to the fluid nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific understanding, along with guidelines and recommendations, may have changed since the original publication date.
For more information and all your COVID-19 coverage, go to the Mayo Clinic News Network and mayoclinic.org.
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