The #1 trait of anti-vaxxers is not “they’re stupid” or “they fell for propaganda” but “they don’t know who’s safe to trust.”
The movement is pushed by women, especially suburban moms, because they know damn well you cannot trust doctors. You cannot trust the medical industry, the billion-dollar corporate zone of “you should lose some weight and maybe the pain will stop.” Cannot trust the ones who keep changing diet advice - is it no sugar? No carbs? No fats? Is it dangerous to let kids eat things in wild colors? Food pyramid: good or bad? They cannot trust the BMI chart that says they should lose 75 lbs to be “healthy.” (Whether or not they “should” lose 75 lbs, they know damn well that “healthy” does not describe any part of the journey to getting there.) Cannot trust the ones who keep giving them incomplete and sometimes incorrect information about contraception. The ones who said “that’s false labor; you have two weeks more” 12 hours before they gave birth. And so on.
So they have their kids, and they want so much for their kids to be safe, and the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.
So they ask: What about if there’s complications? An allergic reaction? Side effects?
And the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.
And they ask, My sister-in-law’s cousin had a really bad reaction to the MMR shot and I want to know how I can tell it’s safe for my kids.
And the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.
Throw in the right-wing/libertarian faction yelling YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO and the insurance companies saying “hey um you need a specific type of coverage for that; we probably cover those vaccinations but you’ll need this special paperwork to be sure” - and then you have the actual anti-vax propagandists yelling some combination of cherry-picked statistics and outright lies, and you get a whole lot of moms willing to say BUGGRE ALL THIS FOR A LARKE.
There is no amount of facts that can fix this. They’re swamped with facts from 300 directions. What they need to fix this is empathy and the kind of connections that lead to trust.
They need to trust that, even as the medical industry dismisses a whole lot of womens’ concerns, in this particular area, they’re right.