Stuck examines how the issues surrounding vaccine hesitancy are, more than anything, about people feeling left out of the conversation. It provides a clear-eyed examination of the social vectors that transmit vaccine rumors, their manifestations around the globe, and how these individual threads are all connected.
Heidi Larson's excellent new book looks at why vaccine rumors cannot simply be put to rest with more evidence and debunking. As she compellingly argues, emotions and sentiments take on lives of their own, spreading between sympathetic individuals and propagating. Fear, mistrust, and anger all play key roles in vaccine denialism, and to ignore these factors is to badly misdiagnose why people do not vaccinate. To change the denier, Larson argues, one must change the ecosystem of doubt and mistrust they live in.