Lay Epidemiology and Its Tools: The Case of Vaccine Sceptics

Increasing vaccine uptake became a national priority in many countries. The lack of public confidence in the vaccines is often explained by the deficiency of knowledge about vaccination or inadequate understanding of information. However, there is extensive evidence that vaccine sceptics have more knowledge about vaccination than people who are ready to be vaccinated. This presentation seeks to explain this paradox by using the concept of lay epidemiology. The idea of lay epidemiology is based on the fact that individuals seek to make sense of the world around them, they make inference about the disease from personal observations and personal stories as well as from the media (both traditional and social) and, increasingly, from readily accessible in the Internet scientific research. In many respects lay epidemiology mirrors professional epidemiology: lay epidemiologists also conduct their own research; they collect and evaluate evidence and they also engage in risk evaluation. Based on 37 semi-structured interviews with vaccine sceptics residing in St. Petersburg, Russia we will systematically compare different aspects of professional and lay epidemiologies, such as ways of becoming an epidemiologist, criteria of evidence, risk evaluation and other features that pertain to epidemiological research. Unlike professional epidemiologists their lay counterparts focus not on populations, but individual cases, and their criteria of evidence, risk evaluations and other aspects related to epidemiological work are fundamentally different. In the era of ever-increasing erosion of public trust in many fundamental (including medical) social institutions the easiest and traditional ways of combatting dissent by disqualifying the dissenters as conspiratorial freaks may not be the most optimal way of dealing with the lay epidemiology phenomenon. The problem constitutes a major challenge for public health with no ready-made solutions.