Is there a link between political orientation and distrust of vaccines, or even anti-vax sentiment? Many scientists have looked into this question, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic. A study published on March 29 in the journal Jama Network Open provides new details. According to this work, citizens of American states with a Republican majority, the party of Donald Trump, are more likely to report adverse effects after receiving a Covid-19 vaccine than residents of states with a Democratic majority, Joe’s party. Biden. Before reaching this conclusion, the researchers examined, between 2020 and 2022, more than 620,000 entries from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database. This monitoring system allows patients, doctors and vaccine manufacturers to voluntarily report symptoms that occur after vaccination.
The researchers then discovered that a 10% increase in votes for the Republican Party in the last presidential election was associated with three effects: a 5% increase in the risk that an adverse effect after Covid vaccination would be reported, a 25% increase in the risk that a serious adverse reaction will be reported and, finally, a 21% increase in the risk that a reported adverse reaction will be serious. The study authors performed the same analysis with flu vaccines to see if they were subject to the same phenomenon, but found no link between reports of side effects and Republican voting. Which suggests that distrust of these vaccines is not greater among Republicans than among Democrats. A logical result, since most of the anti-vaccine attacks in recent years in the United States – but also in France – concern injections against Covid-19.
Republicans more anti-vax than Democrats
“The results are interesting and based on an acceptable methodology,” judges Mahmoud Zureik, professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin. “VAERS includes the statements of people who have real side effects, who simply think they have them, and the statements of conspiracy theorists who water the base with fictitious side effects: so there is a bit of everything and anything, which makes it a particularly suitable tool for this type of study which measures the perception of effects,” he explains. “This is quite solid work,” confirms sociologist Jeremy Ward, research fellow at Inserm and co-coordinator of the SHS Vaccination France network, who also analyzed the study.
The two specialists are, in any case, not surprised by the results. They consider them consistent with previous work. “In the United States, it has been established that the percentage of people who are anti-Covid-19 vaccine or who have reservations about health policies is higher among Republicans than among Democrats,” indicates Professor Zureik. Several studies have also demonstrated that mortality linked to Covid-19 is most important in Republican states. And work published in July 2023 in the journal Jama Internal Medicine show that Americans who voted for Republican candidates in the states of Ohio and Florida in 2017 had mortality equivalent to Democrats through 2021, but that once vaccines were released, their mortality was higher, because they were less vaccinated against Covid-19 than the Democrats. A result that researchers were able to demonstrate thanks to a register which links the vote and the vaccination status of American citizens.
In France, anti-vaxxers are rather apolitical, or at the extremes
“These results add to the growing literature on the relationship between vaccine hesitancy and the reporting of side effects, that is to say both a greater propensity to report an adverse event to the authorities when it occurs , but also the possibility that there is a nocebo effect, or undesirable events caused by negative expectations,” analyzes Jeremy Ward. The latter has also published two studies which show that vaccine hesitancy among the French is also linked to the increase in reports of adverse effects: the first was published in October 2022 in the journal Drug Safetythe second in September 2023 in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research.
However, it remains more complicated to establish a link between the vote of the French and their declarations of adverse effects after vaccination against Covid-19, or even their anti-vax sentiment. In fact, there is no register in France that links vaccination status and voting. It would also be illegal. “We can imagine that the situation is similar here, although to a lesser extent. But in the absence of data it is impossible to say so, confirms Professor Zureik. It would however be possible to study the declarations from the national database of pharmacovigilance by department or region and compare them with the votes of 2022. And it would be interesting to know if the areas voting for the most extreme parties report more adverse effects.”
Previous work, including that of Jeremy Ward, has in fact shown that people who are most distrustful of authorities – political, economic, media or health – are the most likely to be opposed to vaccination. “Anti-vax sentiment is found more among people who totally reject political parties or who are close to far-right parties, and to a lesser extent far-left parties,” he confides. During the pandemic, parties such as Florian Philippot’s Les Patriotes, François Asselineau’s UPR and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan’s Debout la France, as well as numerous personalities affiliated with the far right, stood out for their anti-vaccine positions.
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