How many people support vaccination across the world?

Update

This article was originally published in 2019. It was updated in 2024 with more recent data on public sentiment about the importance of childhood vaccinations.

What percentage of the public think vaccines are safe? What share thinks they are ineffective? And what share denies their importance? In this post we present the global data on attitudes to vaccination. Here is a summary of the results:

• 92% of people in the world think vaccines are important for children to have;
• 7% of people globally disagree that vaccines are safe. But this differs considerably between different countries: France topped the list with 33% disagreeing;
• Globally, 5% of people disagree that vaccines are effective. But skepticism is high in some countries, ranging from 28% in Liberia to less than 1% in Bangladesh and Egypt;
• In many countries few people disagree that vaccines are safe and effective, but the share of people who “neither agree nor disagree” can be more than 50%.

How many people support vaccination across the world?

The London-based research charity The Wellcome Trust published their Wellcome Global Monitor in 2019 on attitudes to science and major health challenges. It is the world’s largest study of its kind, surveying over 140,000 people from over 140 countries. As part of the Gallup World Poll, the 30-question survey ran during 2018.[1]

The Wellcome Trust survey asked three core questions related to attitudes to vaccines: do people think that vaccines are important for children to have; do they think vaccines are safe; and do they believe vaccines are effective.

We have supplemented this with more recent data from the Vaccine Confidence Project, where available.

Most people in the world think vaccines are important for children to have

More than nine-in-ten people in the world think that vaccines are important for children to have.

How support varies across the world is shown in the map. We see high support for vaccination across almost all countries. In most countries over 70% of respondents think child vaccination is important, in many countries it is over 90% who think so.

There is a visible North-South divide in attitudes: support is highest across South Asia, Northern Africa and Southern Africa. Attitudes to vaccination were generally weaker across Europe and North America.

Most people in the world think vaccines are safe, but mistrust is high in some countries

Some parents may not agree for children to be vaccinated if they think vaccines are unsafe or could potentially cause side-effects which are worse than the benefits. How prevalent are these safety concerns?

Globally, a small share of people disagree that vaccines are safe. Only 7% of respondents across the world said they “strongly disagree” or “somewhat disagree” with the statement ‘Vaccines are safe’.

In many countries these concerns are very low: in Bangladesh, for example, less than 1% disagree that vaccines are safe. In neighbouring India, only 2% disagree. We see this distribution across the world in the map.

Trust in vaccines is not high everywhere. There are some clear outliers. The French were most skeptical: 1-in-3 disagreed that vaccines were safe. Many in neighbouring Switzerland and Belgium were also very skeptical: more than 20% disagreed. Other countries with high mistrust of vaccine safety were Gabon (26%); Togo (25%); Russia (24%); Austria (21%), and Iceland (21%).

Only 5% of respondents globally disagree that vaccines are effective but skepticism is much higher in some countries

In response to the statement ‘Vaccines are effective’, only 5% of respondents across all surveyed countries said they “strongly disagree” or “somewhat disagree”. The vast majority of people do not think of vaccines as ineffective.

But, as with the other surveyed questions, this varies significantly across countries. We see this in the map. In some countries, very few respondents disagreed: less than 1% in Bangladesh and Egypt; 2% in India and Ethiopia; and 3% in China, Germany and the UK.

Liberia is most skeptical with 28% disagreeing that vaccines are effective. But skepticism was also high in France (18%); Namibia (16%); Nigeria (16%); and Peru (15%).

In a related post we take a look at why denialism around vaccination exists, and what is effective in addressing it.

Endnotes

[1] It provides data on topics such as trust in science and scientists; trust in sources of information about health; public understanding of the word ‘science’; the intersection between religious teachings and science; and attitudes to vaccines. In this post, we focus on how attitudes to vaccination vary across the world.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from Our World in Data. “How many people support vaccination across the world?” by Hannah Ritchie, Samantha Vanderslott (August 1, 2019), published by Our World in Data under CC BY 4.0. Changed here: set as a page, its interactive charts shown as pictures. Data from third parties keeps its own licence.

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