Vaccine Hesitance: Risks, Persuasion, and influence.

In this edition of The Senior Care Pharmacist, we publish a variety of contributions addressing the issue of vaccination. As the Northern Hemisphere enters the autumn/fall period, this matter assumes a renewed significance, with the rollout of immunization as a preventive strategy for the benefit of both individual patients and the wider community. It is, perhaps, ironic that though effective vaccination services are now available for a range of communicable diseases such as influenza, and that these have only become relatively recently available in the course of medical history, health care workers promoting this approach now face a different problem that has sometimes been referred to as "vaccine hesitance."