Addressing Parents’ Questions About Vaccine Safety and Effectiveness

Although parents receive information about vaccines from multiple sources, they consider health care professionals—their primary care physician as well as all members of the health care team in clinical practice settings—to be their most trusted source of health information. Several factors contribute to parental concerns about vaccines, including: (1) lack of information about the vaccine being administered and about immunizations in general; (2) lack of understanding of the severity and communicability of vaccine-preventable diseases; (3) varied information and misinformation from other sources (eg, alternative medicine practitioners, social media, and the Internet); (4) perceived risk of serious vaccine adverse effects; (5)...