Avnika Amin and Saad Omer of Emory University (and their colleagues) identify some of the fundamental motivations behind 1)
vaccine hesitancy, defined as parents being concerned about vaccinating their kids according to recommended schedules (something 75 percent of pediatricians say they’ve experienced); and 2) outright vaccine refusal, which is fortunately less common and tends to be limited to communities where people share common beliefs. Vaccine-hesitant parents frequently say they worry about putting something foreign into their children’s bodies, so young and pure. They talk about not wanting to put something unnatural into their pure children’s bodies. They worry that vaccines may contain “poisons” and “toxins” and “contaminants”, like thimerosal. That is the semantic expression of the purity/degradation moral value.
People’s Fears About Vaccines Aren’t Just About Vaccines