Internal and external factors affecting vaccination coverage: modeling the interactions between vaccine hesitancy, accessibility, and mandates

Society, culture, and individual motivations affect human decisions regarding their health behaviors and preventative care, and health-related perceptions and behaviors can change at the population level as cultures evolve. An increase in vaccine hesitancy, an individual mindset informed within a cultural context, has resulted in a decrease in vaccination coverage and an increase in vaccine-preventable disease (VPD) outbreaks, particularly in developed countries where vaccination rates are generally high. Understanding local vaccination cultures, which evolve through an interaction between beliefs and behaviors and are influenced by the broader cultural landscape, is critical to fostering public health. Vaccine mandates and vaccine inaccessibility are two external factors that interact with individual beliefs to affect vaccine-related behaviors. To better understand the population dynamics of vaccine hesitancy, it is important to study how these external factors could shape a population’s vaccination decisions and affect the broader health culture. Using a mathematical model of cultural evolution, we explore the effects of vaccine mandates, vaccine inaccessibility, and varying cultural selection trajectories on a population’s level of vaccine hesitancy and vaccination behavior. We show that vaccine mandates can lead to a phenomenon in which high vaccine hesitancy co-occurs with high vaccination coverage, and that high vaccine confidence can be maintained even in areas where access to vaccines is limited.