ABSTRACT
Ubiquitous vaccination is widely considered one of the top public health successes of the last century; but some fear that the public is becoming increasingly averse to the risks of vaccines. Although vaccine policies have changed to reduce vaccine risks (for example, the replacement of oral polio vaccine with injected killed polio vaccine), public health experts tend to regard avoiding vaccines as an extremely risky strategy. Recent focus on smallpox as a potential weapon for bioterrorism increased the importance of understanding how people think about vaccines, vaccination policies and related risks, and complicated the kinds of risk trade-offs that a vaccination choice might entail.
