ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors attempt at providing a sociological “portrait” of vaccine-hesitant individuals. Several sociological variables are considered such as social class, religion, ethnicity, gender and age. While statistical tendencies can be regularly found across these variables, these relations are often weak, heavily dependent on the nature of the vaccine, and especially on its meaning to specific groups in society. If there is one constant trend in the literature on vaccine hesitancy, it is inconsistency. The trends are shifting and change or even reverse depending on the context, the vaccine under consideration, the country, etc. There is vaccine hesitancy in all social environments. It is not a disposition firmly anchored in the personality of individuals and determined once and for all by their membership, in the socio-demographic sense of the term, of a social category.
