Have we reached peak vaccination?: the global vaccination crisis and the politics of misinformation

Brendan Shaw

“Measles has resurged in recent years, even in high-income countries that once eliminated it, because immunization rates have dropped below the 95% threshold.”

-          World Health Organization, “Measles deaths down 88% since 2000, but cases surge”, Media Release, 28 November 2025

“When high-profile global figures start questioning vaccine safety, that doubt travels, regardless of national borders. Unfortunately, it doesn’t just stay confined to one vaccine either. It starts to erode the trust and acceptance we have worked so hard to build for our own childhood [immunisation] programs.”

-          Catherine Hughes, Immunisation Foundation of Australia, 2026

"Hesitancy is rooted in a broader worldview, rather than misperceptions about health risks. Pro-vaccine interventions need to consider the underlying worldview, rather than simply targeting misperceptions."

-          Stoeckel, F., Carter, C., Lyons, B. & Reifler, J. 2022. "The politics of vaccine hesitancy in Europe", European Journal of Public Health.

Vaccination has saved millions of lives over the centuries. There is no doubt about this.

This makes the current global crisis in vaccine hesitancy and the anti-vax movement all the more tragic for humanity.

Source: Spooner, F., Dattani, S., Vlanderslott, S. & Roser, M. 2025. "Vaccination", Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/vaccination, accessed 3/5/2026.

Source: Spooner, F., Dattani, S., Vlanderslott, S. & Roser, M. 2025. "Vaccination", Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/vaccination, accessed 3/5/2026.

As part of the broader push back against experts, science and governments telling people what to do, the risk is that millions of people, many of them children, will die unnecessarily.

The irony is astounding. At a point in human history where we understand more about ourselves and the world around us than ever before, more and more of humanity is reacting against the very knowledge and scientific progress that helped us achieve this.

And people may die as a result.

Vaccination as a public health strategy is in crisis

Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence of the benefits of vaccination, recent stories suggest that vaccine hesitancy fuelled by community mistrust and political opportunism is causing more deaths and disease around the world.

• Earlier this year, the United Kingdom lost its World Health Organization measles-free status after a series of measles outbreaks and fall in vaccination rates.

• Recently, Bangladesh suffered a measles outbreak on the back of falling vaccination rates and vaccine supply shortages, with a suspected 166 deaths of children under 2 years of age directly as a result of measles.

• In March, a meningitis B outbreak in Canterbury in the United Kingdom caused the death of a student and triggered discussions about post-Covid vaccine fatigue.

• A re-emergence of diphtheria in an outbreak this year in the Northern Territory in Australia – a disease that vaccination eliminated in the country a century ago – and a whooping cough outbreak in 2024 and 2025 were caused in part by falling vaccination rates.

• Last year international organisations the WHO, UNICEF and GAVI in a joint statement warned about a global increase in vaccine-preventable diseases that threaten to undo years of global health progress.

• At the end of last year, the WHO warned that while measles deaths worldwide have plummeted 88% since 2000, cases are surging again due to falling immunisation rates.

• Other high-income countries like the US and Canada have lost their measles-free designation in the last 12 months due to surging measles cases caused by falling vaccination rates and vaccine scepticism.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a global resurgence in vaccine-preventable diseases.

Post-pandemic vaccine fatigue and vaccine hesitancy

Ironically, vaccine hesitancy and growing mistrust in vaccines has been fuelled by the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath, together with misinformation from anti-vaccination movements, and global funding cuts to vaccination programs.

Ian Lipkin, John Snow professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, has said that Covid-19 has resulted in “a lack of trust in public health and the implications for people refusing vaccines”.

Vaccine mandates and a younger generation now growing up who are reacting against previous vaccine policies are contributing to community wariness and scepticism about vaccination.

None of this is helped by comments by the populist politicians, increasingly from the far right. Where once anti-vax movements were a blend of left-leaning environmental groups, hippies and the like, increasingly far right political parties are galvanising anti-vax fears, supporting conspiracy theories, and promoting vaccine misinformation in the community to grow their electoral appeal. Right-wing politicians in countries like Australia, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Romania, the United Kingdom and the United States have spread misinformation and supported anti-vax agendas in recent years.

However, vaccine hesitancy was a growing problem long before the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2019, the WHO labelled vaccine hesitancy as one of the top 10 threats to global health. This is not a new problem.

We had a reminder of this back in 2019 when 80 children died in Samoa from a measles outbreak that was triggered in part by anti-vaxxers from places like Australia and the United States campaigning there in the months leading up to the deaths.

Part of the vaccine hesitancy movement story is also about complacency in high-income countries.

In rich countries where vaccination has been successful in eliminating diseases, people are becoming complacent about the risks of infectious disease.

The telling statistic is that people in poor countries – where they often can’t access vaccination for their kids – are much more supportive of vaccination than in rich countries. The reason is that people in poor countries can still see firsthand what happens to populations that don’t have high vaccination rates.

 Source: Spooner, F., Dattani, S., Vlanderslott, S. & Roser, M. 2025. "Vaccination", Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/vaccination, accessed 3/5/2026.

So, here's another irony in the anti-vax debate. In rich countries where many deadly infectious diseases have been eliminated as a result of vaccination support for childhood vaccination has dropped, whereas in less developed countries where infectious diseases are still a problem and vaccination rates need to improve, support for childhood vaccination is strongest.

Perhaps the anti-vax movement has grown in part because vaccines have done such a good job of eliminating infectious diseases in rich countries. People in rich countries have forgotten what it's like to watch a child die from an entirely preventable disease.

One of the problems in lower-income countries is not peoples' opposition to vaccination, but the fact people often just can't get access to the vaccines they want and need. This can be due to lack of funding, or supply chain issues, or lack of facilities in the health system.

The politics of polarisation and mistrust

The opposition to vaccination is becoming a part of the broader global loss of trust in governments and scientists worldwide.

What has perhaps delayed and confounded well-meaning public health initiatives to address vaccine hesitancy has been a reluctance or inability to deal with the politics of the antivax movement.

The pushback from people in the community against vaccination is often part of a broader political movement witnessed in many countries of populist refusal and polarisation in the community.

As well as distrust of politicians and vaccination messages by disenfranchised people providing support to anti-establishment populist movements, populist political parties are also sowing distrust in vaccination as a way to promote their own political agenda. In effect, it's a two-way feedback loop. Vaccination has become part of a broader global political debate, despite the best efforts of health experts.

Despite all the available scientific evidence, anti-vaccination politics is being promoted in many countries around the world through misinformation on social media, a push back against elites, anti-science movements, and promotion of such counter-factual views by prominent people in society. The problem is that this discussion normalises anti-vaccination positions, despite all the evidence showing that vaccination works.

Redressing this political feedback loop to protect human health is not going to be easy. In a world where distrust of institutions and elites is on the rise, and people have active political agendas to sow seeds of doubt in peoples' minds, convincing people that vaccination is vital to their own health, that of their children and the broader community is difficult.

Clearly, it's not that the problem isn't real. The objective evidence demonstrates the worldwide benefit of vaccination. We just need to find better ways to convince people.

The 2,000 year-old solution – ethos, pathos and logos

I’ve written elsewhere about how instructive Aristotle’s 2,000-year-old recipe for persuasion is still relevant to the vaccination debate today.

The political philosopher Aristotle realised that persuading people about a point of view wasn't just about having all the facts and evidence to support your case. It's how you present it to people that also matters.

Convincing vaccine sceptics on the value of vaccination is not just an exercise in getting more data and more research. It’s about emotion. It’s about winning hearts as well as minds.

Health experts, governments, political leaders, sports stars, movie stars, pharmaceutical companies (yes, pharma companies), international agencies, media groups, religious and community leaders, parents and grandparents all need to start using clever and genuine ways to better communicate the data, evidence and necessity of vaccination. This needs to combine the use of clear facts and evidence on the benefits of vaccination, which are everywhere and plain to see, with the emotional and genuine case as to why vaccination is vital.

The challenge for experts, is that this communication also needs to start from respecting the very people they disagree with. Respecting someone's views while you disagree with them is a skill we probably need to rediscover.

There are two contrasting examples from 18^th century European monarchs in their approach to leading and communicating about vaccination. In the 1760s as smallpox raged through Europe, Russian Empress, Catherine the Great, led by example. She inoculated not only herself, but her son and heir. As writer, Lucy Ward, as has said:

“The empress believed the science. But she also understood human emotion. She publicised her own trust in the practice to her fearful subjects, urging them to follow her lead.”

As Ward points out, this stands in contrast to Catherine the Great’s counterpart around the same time, the French monarch and inoculation-sceptic King Louis XV, who “died horribly of smallpox in his palace in Versailles in 1774, his face blackened with scabs and oozing pustules”.

Yes, data is important. The evidence on the benefits of vaccination for individuals and humanity is overwhelming. If the debate were really just about the evidence and the data, it would be over in five minutes.

Hundreds of years of history have shown that vaccination works. There are millions of people alive on the planet today because of it. It's been one of humanity's greatest achievements as a species.

However, winning hearts and minds is not just about showing people charts with convincing data. It’s about involving them in the discussion and the debate, respecting them, and convincing them about why it matters.

It’s something we must do better at. For the sake of children, people and humanity everywhere.

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