The conventional wisdom among pandemic researchers was that vaccine-hesitant parents would come around once federal authorities green-lit COVID-19 shots for children. But, as a new study shows, that hasn’t happened. Parents actually have even more concerns about vaccines, catching researchers by surprise.
Parents registered high levels of worry across the board, with more than half of them expressing misgivings about how new the vaccine is, whether it has been tested enough, whether it even works, and side effects, according to findings from the Covid States Project, a collaborative effort by researchers from Northeastern, Harvard, Northwestern, and Rutgers.
“My intuition would not have been that FDA [Food and Drug Administration] OK comes and concerns go up,” says David Lazer, university distinguished professor of political science and computer sciences at Northeastern, and one of the study’s authors. “I am surprised at some of the very substantial shifts against the vaccine among parents.”
