European citizens’ opinions on immunisation

As part of a larger study exploring how European citizens’ balance issues of public and private interest and the extent to which they are prepared to accept State intervention on a range of public health issues, focus group participants were asked whether childhood immunisation should be a matter of parental choice or State compulsion. The question was debated in 66 (of 96) focus groups held across 16 European countries in 2003. Discussions focused on the concept of risk, trust in health professionals and the State, upholding the status quo, fears over vaccine safety and perceptions of infectious disease as a ‘foreign threat’.