Resolving the small-pockets problem helps clarify the role of education and political ideology in shaping vaccine scepticism.

Understanding the factors associated with vaccine scepticism is challenging because of the 'small-pockets' problem: The number of highly vaccine-sceptical people is low, and small subsamples such as these can be missed using traditional regression approaches. To overcome this problem, the current study (N = 5,200) used latent profile analysis to uncover six profiles, including two micro-communities of vaccine-sceptical people who have the potential to jeopardize vaccine-led herd immunity. The most vaccine-sceptical group (1.

Vaccine hesitancy is strongly associated with distrust of conventional medicine, and only weakly associated with trust in alternative medicine.

Rationale And Objective: It is well established that people who use complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) are, on the whole, more vaccine hesitant. One possible conclusion that can be drawn from this is that trusting CAM results in people becoming more vaccine hesitant. An alternative possibility is that vaccine hesitancy and use of CAM are both downstream consequences of a third factor: distrust in conventional treatments.