Why doesn’t evidence cut through? Why do reason and learning so often fail? They’re themes that have haunted this blog since its inception way back in the COVID‑19 days of 2020. Aren’t we supposed to be the heirs of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and all that? Maybe part of the answer lies in this story about the UK and Japan, and their startlingly different experiences with their respective HPV vaccination programmes, as detailed in this excellent Conversation article by Professor Justin Stebbing of Anglia Ruskin University [1].
On the face of it, vaccines are a winner: the biology is clearly understood, they save lives, and they have eliminated numerous diseases [2]. Which explains the success of the UK rollout of the HPV vaccine: Justin has a barrage of juicy statistics, but in his words the NHS now feels able to publish a plan to eliminate cervical cancer as a public health problem in England by 2040. Compare that with Japan, where following a reasonable start, the HPV vaccine campaign collapsed into desuetude. There were media stories, the government lost its nerve: the result is” that among girls born in certain years, coverage fell from around 70% to below 1%, and it remained at that level for years“. And Justin explains the dreary consequences at some length.
So why can’t we understand the difference between the two countries? In the end, vaccine hesitancy has very little to do with the science and everything to do with the stories people swim in. The biology stays constant; what shifts is the cultural weather around it. A rumour here, a misframed headline there, a neighbour’s anecdote, a politician’s stumble — tiny changes in narrative that can tilt whole communities from confidence to doubt. Vaccination succeeds or fails not in the laboratory but in the social world: in trust networks, identity cues, and the fragile ways humans decide whom to believe. It is anthropology, not virology, that explains why one hospital bed stays empty and another does not.
In other words, public health is really about anthropology, not biology. One person who understands this well is Gillian Tett, whose formidable book Anthro‑Vision [3] argues that the real drivers of human behaviour are rarely the numbers on the page but the cultural currents beneath them — the stories people trust, the tribes they belong to, the risks they feel rather than calculate. Public health often talks in data, but people decide in narrative. A stray rumour, a clumsy headline, a shift in group mood can undo months of scientific clarity, while a well‑placed story or trusted voice can restore confidence just as fast. And suddenly this becomes true of many of the things that preoccupy us here — climate change, economics, even the long arc of female emancipation. For all our “LSS are the heirs‑of‑the‑Age‑of‑Reason,” for all our Whiggish rhetoric, we’ve missed one important truth. People are not how we would like them to be. And this book tells us a lot about why.
[1]https://theconversation.com/the-hpv-vaccine-works-but-only-if-we-keep-trusting-it-285618?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20fo
[2] Why vaccination is important and the safest way to protect yourself – NHS
[3]Tett, Gillian. Anthro‑Vision: How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life. London: Random House Business, 2021.
#vaccination #public health # HPV #anthropology #biology #culture #history
Learning, Science and Society 