Polio survivors' perspectives on vaccine hesitancy: a qualitative interview study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and recent measles outbreaks have brought the topic of vaccine hesitancy to the forefront of the public imagination. This research sought to understand Canadian polio survivors' perceptions of vaccines and vaccine hesitancy. We interviewed 65 individuals with post-polio syndrome and used NVivo to code the qualitative descriptive analysis. Participants expressed worry regarding the declining rates of childhood vaccine acceptance. All participants championed the polio vaccine and encouraged its universal uptake. Some vaccines (e.g., MMR, diphtheria) were consistently accepted as beneficial. While most interviewees accepted the COVID-19 vaccine, a minority expressed hesitancy. Participants expressed a willingness to share their polio stories to encourage childhood vaccine uptake. Polio survivors are an aging population with lived experience regarding vaccine-preventable disease. Future public health campaigns regarding vaccine uptake should endeavour to include structured engagement with post-polio support groups across Canada and internationally as community vaccine champions. Importantly, vaccine acceptance should be considered as a spectrum, and primary care physicians should be encouraged to review vaccine safety for all vaccines even with patients who express general acceptance. • Polio survivors are motivated to share their stories to encourage vaccine uptake. • Polio survivors express concern about rising vaccine hesitancy. • Vaccine acceptance is not monolithic.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".