She’s spent two decades talking to parents who don’t vaccinate their children. Here’s what she’s learned

STAT interviews sociologist Jennifer Reich of the University of Colorado ahead of the STAT Summit and amid an ongoing measles outbreak in Pennsylvania. Reich has spent nearly two decades studying families' immunization decisions and is not anti-vaccine herself—her children received vaccines on the CDC schedule—but she argues that parents who decline vaccines should not be dismissed as selfish, stupid, or abusive; their choices can be logical.

Reich traces vaccine hesitancy to broader cultural pressures. Parents are asked every day to make perfect, informed decisions about health, schooling, purchases, groceries, food, and tutoring, and modern wellness culture reinforces the idea that individual choices—like step goals or calorie counting—can prevent illness. That can lead some parents to believe they can prepare their children to weather an infectious disease. She adds that society never asks parents to worry about other people's children, so rejecting vaccines that do not feel relevant to their own child seems logical.

In her interviews, she found the dominant narrative—that parents are selfish or anti-science—to be untrue. Parents made sophisticated, child-focused decisions, weighing scientific information to assess whether their own child would most benefit from a vaccine. After talking with families, pediatricians, and experts, she concluded that vaccine hesitancy is often a logical outcome of the cultural pressures placed on families.

She notes that mothers in particular spent extensive time trying to understand each vaccine's science, risks, and benefits while questioning whether all vaccines benefit all children. Their conclusions were not necessarily anti-science or unscientific; they used a logic centered on whether their own child would benefit most, rather than the broader impact on others. The Q&A was compiled from two interviews and edited for length and clarity.