'Infecting Minds' Vaccine Hesitancy Project: Resources, Materials and Outputs
This is a collection containing resources generated through the 'Infecting Minds' project.
'Infecting Minds' brings together teams in the UK and South Africa to study vaccine hesitancy, between 2022-2023. We are interested in understanding barriers to vaccination, learning how beliefs and behaviours around vaccines develop, persist and spread in different settings, and taking a view of vaccination that is informed by historical narratives to better inform current and future approaches.
Our team is a diverse group of professionals including historians, theologians, social scientists, science communicators, teachers, laboratory scientists and clinical doctors. We bring different backgrounds, experience and insights, recogising that vaccine hesitancy is a complex issue with many dimensions.
Our project has three main aims:
- We have set out to gather information about the history of vaccination, and the narratives that have developed around this, with a particular interest in comparing European and African stories.
- We are collecting information through interviews and group discussions with people in KwaZulu-Natal South Africa, to develop an understanding of their perspectives on vaccination, and insights into the background and origins of vaccine hesitancy.
- We are establishing workshops with school students in the UK and South Africa, promoting open conversations about their experiences and narratives, and offering new ways to think about the past, present and future of vaccination. Developing links between schools in South Africa and the UK will allow the students to connect, exploring shared experiences but also learning from others with different perspectives.
Funders and partners
Our UK team is based at the University of Oxford and the Francis Crick Institute in London. Our South Africa team is based at the Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI) in KwaZulu-Natal.
We are supported by funding from the Wellcome Institutional Stategic Support Fund (ISSF) at Oxford University, Oxford University John Fell Fund and The Francis Crick Institute. We are working in close partnership with Cheney School, and Cheney's Rumble Museum, in Oxford.
We are grateful to all the schools, students and teachers who have participated in our public engagement programme, and to participants in social sciences research.
For more information, see our project website: https://infectingminds.web.ox.ac.uk/home
