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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".