Engaging students to tackle vaccine hesitancy through peer-to-peer education
We believe students hold an immense amount of power to build a more literate, empowered, and healthy future by working to address gaps in vaccine education among youth, and leveraging the benefits of peer-to-peer education to not only make educated decisions about their own health, but also encourage their peers, family, and communities to do the same.
In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) listed vaccine hesitancy as a top threat to global health. Vaccine hesitancy continued to be a significant barrier to achieving herd immunity necessary to ending the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021.
Public health efforts to increase vaccine uptake are often focused on adults. However, children make up around a quarter of the population globally, so increasing vaccination rates in this group is critical in ensuring that herd immunity can be reached. Despite this, vaccination rates are not only particularly low among children, but also decreasing over time.
The rise of social media has further exacerbated the issue of vaccine hesitancy by amplifying vaccine misinformation. Among all age groups, children and adolescents are among those most active on social media, and are thus especially at risk of being exposed to or targeted by vaccine misinformation campaigns.
Education is a key tool to help tackle vaccine misinformation and overcome vaccine hesitancy. Introducing vaccine education from a young age is especially important in preventing misinformation about vaccines from crystallizing and compounding over many decades. Unfortunately, the science of vaccines and their importance in society is rarely taught in classrooms in the US and in Canada.
Peer-to-peer education has been demonstrated to be a powerful medium to communicate sensitive information related to health and behavior among adolescents. Studies have shown that peer education can be more effective than traditional teaching by adults in improving knowledge about preventative health measures partially because teens tend to perceive trained peer educators to be more credible sources of information than adult educators.
Last Updated: May 29, 2023