The Historical Roots of Vaccine Hesitancy: Evidence from Germany

Christine Binzel and Andreas Link

No 18109, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: This paper examines the historical roots of vaccine hesitancy in Germany. Drawing on digitized data from the year 1900 on the strength of the naturopathic movement -- the largest movement critical of medicine, including vaccinations, at that time -- we show that counties with a higher number of such associations in 1900 have significantly lower vaccination rates today. In terms of underlying mechanisms, we show that the movement changed the way health care is provided and we present evidence indicating that it affected the intergenerational transmission of norms.

Keywords: COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 N33 P25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP18109 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:18109

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP18109

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().