Most people welcomed the opportunity to get vaccinated against COVID-19, yet a non-trivial minority did not. Vaccine-resistant people tend to hold strong views and assertively reject conventional medical or public health recommendations. This is puzz
To compound matters further, some vaccine-resistant study members had cognitive difficulties since childhood, along with their early-life adversities and emotional vulnerabilities. They had been poor readers in high school and scored low on the study's tests of verbal comprehension and processing speed. These tests measure the amount of effort and time a person requires to decode incoming information.
More starkly, the New Zealand death rate per million population is currently 71. This compares favorably to other democracies such as the US with 2,949 deaths per million , UK at 2,423 per million and Canada at 991 per million .How then do we reconcile our finding that 13 percent of our cohort were vaccine resistant and the national vaccination rate now sits at 95 percent? There are a number of factors that helped drive the rate this high.
This is consistent with our findings which highlight the importance of understanding individual life histories and different ways of thinking about the world – which are both attributable to adversities experienced by some people early in life. This has the added benefit of encouraging a more compassionate view towards vaccine resistance, which might ultimately translate into higher rates of vaccine preparedness.