11 Nov
2021
Dying for ignorance? 1918-influenza mortality, vaccination skepticism and vaccination behavior
How do societies respond to epidemic crisis in both stated political preferences and revealed health-related behavior? To answer this question, we link overmortality during the 1918-influenza to the political support of compulsory vaccination and to real vaccination behavior before and after the 1918-flu. We rely on the 1922 popular vote in Grisons when Grisons’ voters have to decide about compulsory vaccination in their canton. We find that a 1% higher overmortality during the 1918-flu reduces the support of the compulsory vaccination bill by almost 3%. The results are robust to different specifications regarding the definition of flu-affectedness, the inclusion of regional fixed effects and socio-economic variables. Other popular votes, by contrast, do not correlate with overmortality neither before nor after 1918. We are now digitizing real vaccination behavior at the municipality level using smallpox vaccination reports from 1907 to 1933. We aim to show whether revealed health-related behavior differ from the political statement by investigating a potential shift in vaccination abstinence after 1918. We further aim to distinguish among two potential channels to explain the results – cognitive dissonance and mistrust into experts or the government. The results might improve our understanding how epidemics might shift a society towards ignorance and mistrust into experts. Parallels to the COVID-19 epidemic show that part of the population are still acting ignorant today as our ancestors have done so 100 years ago.