Scientists from Duke University found the cause of covid-19 vaccine resistance.
The research is published in PNAS Nexus and was conducted by Terrie Moffitt et al.
The team was curious about why some people have been so passionately, often angrily, opposed to vaccination against the COVID-19 virus.
They turned to their database, the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, which has been tracking all of the nearly 1,000 people born in 1972 and 1973 in a single town in New Zealand.
Since childhood, the researchers have measured multiple social, psychological and health factors in each of the participants’ lives, resulting in a steady stream of research publications offering deep insights into how childhood and its environment forms the adult.
They ran a special survey of their participants in the middle of 2021 to gage vaccination intentions shortly before the vaccines became available in New Zealand.
Then they matched each individual’s responses to what they know about that person’s upbringing and personality style.
The Gallup organization estimated last year that about one in five Americans was vaccine-resistant.
The team showed that 40 years ago in childhood, many of the participants who said they were now vaccine-resistant or hesitant had adverse childhood experiences, including abuse, neglect, threats, and deprivations.
The team says these people learned from a tender age ‘don’t trust the grownups’.
And that kind of learning at that age leaves you with a sort of a legacy of mistrust. It’s so deep-seated that it automatically brings up extreme emotions.
The survey also showed that the mistrust was widespread, extending not only to institutions and influencers, but also to family, friends and co-workers.
At ages 13 and 15, the vaccine-resistant group had tended to believe that their health was a matter of external factors beyond their control.
At age 18, the teens who became the vaccine-resistant and hesitant groups also were more likely to shut down under stress, more alienated, more aggressive.
They also tended to value personal freedom over social norms, and being nonconformist.
The resistant and hesitant groups had scored lower on mental processing speed, reading level, and verbal ability as children.
At age 45, before the pandemic, these people were also found to have less practical everyday health knowledge, which suggests they may have been less well-equipped to make health decisions in the stress of the pandemic.
The team says the best investments people could make now would be in building children’s trust and building stable environments, and ensuring that if the individual caregiver fails them, society will take care of them.
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