A taxonomy of anti-vaccination arguments from a systematic literature review and text modelling

The proliferation of anti-vaccination arguments is a threat to the success of many immunisation programmes. Effective rebuttal of contrarian arguments requires an approach that goes beyond addressing flaws in the arguments, by also considering the attitude roots—that is, the underlying psychological attributes driving a person’s belief—of opposition to vaccines. Through a preregistered systematic literature review of 152 scientific articles and thematic analysis of anti-vaccination arguments, we developed a hierarchical taxonomy that relates common arguments and themes to 11 attitude roots that explain why an individual might express opposition to vaccination. We further validated our taxonomy on COVID-19 anti-vaccination misinformation, through a combination of human coding and machine learning using natural language processing algorithms. Overall, the taxonomy serves as a theoretical framework to link expressed opposition of vaccines to their underlying psychological processes. This enables future work to develop targeted rebuttals and other interventions that address the underlying motives of anti-vaccination arguments.