Vaccine Hesitancy: Experimentalism as Regulatory Opportunity

This issue on patient innovation has prompted us to explore problems related to departures from official vaccination schedules. Vaccine confidence has been plummeting across the world. In this essay, we argue that a more granular understanding of vaccine hesitancy—and ultimately a more finely tuned regulatory framework—is needed to reflect the current behavioral heterogeneity among indicated patients who choose to forego or delay administration of recommended vaccines. In particular, we focus on a phenomenon we term “vaccine staggering:” a departure from vaccination schedules in the form of delays in receiving one or more vaccines, which is motivated by the desire to boost the efficacy of each vaccine received by a child or adult