Vaccines being prepared during the visit of a two months old baby boy | Jaspers Jacobs/AFP via Getty Images Europe most vaccine-skeptic region in the world, survey says France is the most vaccine-skeptic country.

Europe is a deep pocket of doubt when it comes to vaccines.

Between 10 percent and 22 percent of people in countries across Europe don’t trust that vaccines are safe, a new survey published Wednesday by the Wellcome Trust found.

Europe appears to be the most vaccine-skeptic region in the world, with France being the country with the lowest level of trust in vaccines globally. A third of people living in the country disagree that vaccines are safe.

Vaccine skepticism is also high in Eastern Europe, with only 50 percent of people agreeing that vaccines are safe.

Doubts about vaccines overall are highest in high-income regions — vaccines are a victim of their own success, campaigners say, since many people in developed countries have not had to deal with the infectious diseases they protect against.

Almost all people in Bangladesh and Rwanda agree that vaccines are safe, effective and are important for children to have.

“In developing countries, where deadly diseases like diphtheria, measles or whooping cough are more common, I’ve seen mothers queue for hours to make sure their child is vaccinated,” Seth Berkley, the CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a global health partnership, said in reaction to the survey.

The vaccine reticence in wealthier countries “is a luxury we can ill afford,” Berkley said.

Support within the developing world means eight in 10 people globally agree that vaccines are safe. More than 90 percent of parents worldwide said their children have received a vaccine, and only 6 percent of parents said they have not.

But only 73 percent of people in Northern Europe and 72 percent of people in Northern America agree that vaccines are safe. The same figure reaches 95 percent in South Asia.

Anti-vax impact

In high-income countries “people are more and more concerned about the environment, organics and trying to do the right things for their families, [so] it’s easier for rumors to spread because they don’t see the benefits [of vaccines],” Berkley told POLITICO, highlighting the impact of misinformation about vaccines circulated on social media.

While trust in vaccines tends to be strongly linked to trust in scientists and medical professionals, in Europe that link seems broken — people distrust vaccine safety despite 86 percent of them trusting doctors and nurses, according to the survey.

In France, vaccine skepticism increased following a controversial flu vaccination campaign in 2009, during which the World Health Organization “was alleged to have been influenced by pharmaceutical companies,” the report says.

The country saw measles cases jump from 518 in 2017 to almost 3,000 in 2018, more than a 400 percent increase, according to the report.

Vaccination rates are now on the rise due to the government’s decision to raise the number of mandatory vaccines from three to 11 last year.

Forcing people to get vaccinated has proved controversial in Europe, with strong opposition in both France and in Italy where 10 vaccines were made mandatory in 2017. The governing parties, both of which have at times campaigned on a vaccine-skeptic platform, are trying to ditch the obligation to vaccinate but want to ensure vaccination rates don’t dip as a result.

How these mandatory policies are presented is crucial for their acceptance, Gavi’s Berkley told POLITICO.

“If you go in and say, ‘We the government are gonna tell you what to do,’ I think that makes it challenging. If you say, ‘We are trying to pass laws that protect the population. Think about wearing seatbelts or wearing a motorcycle helmet or not smoking in public places’ ... These were all regulations that were about protecting the population. It needs to be seen like that,” he said.

The Wellcome Global Monitor is the first study of public attitudes to science and health on a global scale, according to the organization.

It was conducted by Gallup and surveyed 140,000 people around the world aged over 15 between April and December 2018.