The French had less confidence in the safety of vaccines than the residents of 66 other countries recently surveyed by researchers.

A team lead by anthropologist Heidi Larson of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine conducted what it contends is “the largest survey on confidence in immunization to date,” interviewing more than 65,000 people. As the researchers report online in EBioMedicine today, 41% of respondents in France disagreed with the assertion that vaccines are safe. On average, just 12% of respondents in other nations disagreed with this statement.

“I didn’t expect France to be as negative as it was,” says Larson, who runs The Vaccine Confidence Project, a nonprofit that monitors public concerns about immunization. At the other end of the scale, only 0.2% of the respondents in Bangladesh had similar safety misgivings.

Larson notes that France recently has experienced “anxiety” about suspected but unproven links between the hepatitis B vaccine and multiple sclerosis and, separately, the human papillomavirus vaccine and side effects like fatigue in girls. France similarly had strong reservations about a flu vaccine quickly made to combat the pandemic of H1N1 in 2009. “There was a furor that the government bought so much of that vaccine and a worry that it was made too quickly and couldn’t be safe,” Larson says.

Read more at...http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/france-most-skeptical-country-about-vaccine-safety?utm_source=sciencemagazine&utm_medium=facebook-text&utm_campaign=francine-7233


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