‘There is a lot of distrust’: Why women in their 30s are hesitant about the Covid vaccine | Society

When the Australian government launched its $ 24 million Covid-19 vaccine information campaign this week, the main targets among the main targets were women aged 30 to 39, who turned out to be the most common group. more reluctant to vaccinate the Australian population by Department of Health research.

Similar patterns of vaccine reluctance in women have been observed around the world. The question on everyone’s lips is therefore: what motivates him? The answer is we don’t know, because we haven’t asked.

Many reports fear that the reluctance to vaccinate is fueled by the burgeoning wellness culture, but Dr. Kate Young, a researcher at the Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation at the University of Queensland tech, told The Guardian that wasn’t the whole story.

Young said we wouldn’t stand a chance of convincing this hesitant group to get the vaccine unless we know exactly what their concerns are.

“We all just decided to prescribe these reasons for women as to why they don’t get the vaccine – people say it’s the wellness community, it’s because they do yoga and love to watch Instagram “she said. “But we don’t really know because no one has done the research.”

Young encounters a refrain we hear too often in women’s health: “We just don’t know.” Or maybe more precisely, we don’t care to know.

But experts working in the field have their own theories, and wellness influencers aren’t at the top of the list.

Pregnant women and unknown vaccine

First, the vaccine-reluctant population overlaps with another social group that we don’t want to know much about. There’s a reason all the experts interviewed for this story said they were overlooked in this conversation: Women aged 30-39 in Australia are the group most likely to be pregnant, breastfeeding, or raising. a young family.

“What are most women in this age group doing in Australia? They’re going to have babies, ”Young said.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics currently sets the average childbearing age in Australia at 30.7, and the Australian Institute for Family Studies has found that in 2020, your late twenties and early thirties. women are the most common age to become a new mother.

Dr Naomi Smith, a sociology lecturer at Federation University Australia who has published research on anti-vaccination beliefs in Australia, said this notion fits with her research suggesting that vaccine reluctance is highly feminized because that the responsibility for health care is highly feminized.

The hesitant vaccination movement is “tied to motherhood and women’s responsibility for the health of their children, especially in the early years,” she said.

And when it comes to why women who are considering parenting are cautious about getting the vaccine, Young said the reasons were pretty clear.

“The World Health Organization has recommended that pregnant women not [Pfizer] vaccine because it has not been tested on pregnant women, ”she said. The Royal Australia and New Zealand College for Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued a similar opinion on Tuesday, saying it was not recommending the Covid-19 vaccine to pregnant women due to a lack of safety data.

A story of exclusion

A recent study by the medical journal Lancet found that three-quarters of trials of any of the Covid-19 treatments or vaccines have explicitly excluded pregnant women. This despite the fact that we know that pregnant women who contract Covid-19 are more likely to end up in intensive care than other patients.

A review of the trials found that scientists did not provide reasons for excluding pregnant women.

Concerns about the dangers of including pregnant women in clinical trials are understandable. As one study noted, “Many substances, including drugs, can cross the placenta and potentially irreversibly affect the growth, structure or function of the fetus, there can be a significant risk of harm to the fetus. unborn baby. “

Physiological changes that occur during pregnancy can also mean that researchers cannot be sure how different drugs will interact with women’s bodies.

But according to Dr Loulou Kobeissi, a scientist at the World Health Organization, these reasons do not apply to the majority of trials of Covid-19 vaccines and treatments. “The systematic exclusion of pregnant women cannot be justified on the basis of safety because most of the drugs evaluated are not harmful during pregnancy, or their risks are minimal,” she said.

Because pregnant women were banned from participating in trials following the 1960s thalidomide scandal – a decision overturned only in 2019 – we just don’t know what the effects of the vaccine might be on mothers or fetuses. Without any proof, mothers or mothers-to-be do not know if they should receive the vaccine.

Another reason that women are more reluctant to get the vaccine is because they don’t know much about their bodies – because the exclusion of scientific tests does not historically stop with pregnant women. It extends to all women. The majority of all scientific and medical tests are performed on bodies, animals and male cells.

Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston said in a 2014 report that medical science “consistently fails” to include women in clinical trials and at all stages of medical research. A 2016 report published in Pharmacy Practice cited evidence that historically medicine has failed to adequately enroll women in scientific studies and these gaps “have hampered progress in understanding women’s response to drugs ”.

Until just 25 years ago, all women of childbearing age were routinely excluded from medical studies, with scientists assuming test results on men’s bodies would apply to women as well.

And so this story comes back to the one we’ve heard more and more recently, but not in the context of vaccine reluctance: we just don’t know enough about how women’s bodies work.

A matter of trust

This lack of medical knowledge about women’s bodies is also part of a larger story. There is also a trust gap.

The fact that doctors have historically had little knowledge of the biology of women means that women are much more likely than men to have had negative experiences with the health care system. This means they are more likely to be wary of doctors, said Dr Naomi Smith.

“We know from previous research that women are less likely to be trusted by doctors about pain and chronic disease,” Smith said. “Women are underdiagnosed or treated for psychological issues instead of their physical symptoms.

“In a system that can often be hostile to women and their health needs, women often have less confidence in the medical establishment because they are not taken seriously.”

Smith’s point is repeatedly confirmed in the scientific literature. Endometriosis, a disease in which cells similar to those lining the uterus called endometrial cells begin to grow throughout the body, is an often cited example. The stray tissue and cells can cause pain, internal adhesions, bleeding, gastrointestinal issues, fatigue, and a host of other symptoms depending on where the disease takes hold in the body.

But the condition is poorly understood and, therefore, poorly treated. It has long been dismissed as a “bad period,” and doctors are only now discovering that it is a system-wide disease with far-reaching consequences.

Studies show that women’s distrust of medicine also increases when they have other health problems specific to gynecology such as polycystic ovary syndrome.

Many other chronic pains primarily affecting women, including lupus, migraines, fibromyalgia, and fibroids, are also underdiagnosed and undertreated. Lupus is a serious autoimmune disease of which 90% of the victims are women, and which occurs most often in women of childbearing age. But we know very little about it, and as a result, 66% of those diagnosed with the condition said they were previously misdiagnosed.

In fact, 40% of all women diagnosed with severe autoimmune disease had previously been told by doctors that there was nothing wrong or were accused of being hypochondriacs.

Young said that knowing that medical science doesn’t necessarily know what’s best for women and their bodies is something women metabolize early on and could be a major contributing factor to vaccine reluctance among. this population.

“Women know they are not included,” she said. “If you take an average woman on the street, she might not know the number of women in research studies, but it’s something that you grow up with, when you go over and over to your GP and that they just don’t understand, and you get fired over and over again.

“There is a lot of mistrust of the system among women. Historically, we have won this distrust. “

By not including women in scientific research, the medical establishment also continues to mistreat and misdiagnose disorders in the bodies of women they know too little about, leading to further distrust of the system. , which can make these people vulnerable to messages that question the authorities. It’s cyclical and self-reinforcing.

Recognizing the complex reasons for reluctance to vaccinate is essential in the fight against the coronavirus. This means we need to ask women what their concerns are and be prepared to listen if the answer is that it’s hard to trust a system that has excluded and damaged them – again and again.