On March 1, 2012 the Vaccine Confidence Project (VPC)  launched it’s website.  The projects stated purpose was to anticipate, monitor and understand issues around public confidence in vaccines. With “public trust’ as an issue documented in 2008,  just before the 2010 WHO Decade of Vaccines launch, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided funding for the “Project to support public confidence in Immunization Programs” which began around February 23, 2011 at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and led by Dr Heidi Larson, a “social and political” focused PhD scientist, formally with UNICEF, GAVI, Harvard and Chatham House. [5, 6]

Officially the VPC state that Heidi Larson began the project in 2010.  Larson also served on the WHO SAGE Working Group on vaccine hesitancy.

From the start the LSHTM team began developing a Vaccine Confidence Index (VCI) in order to measure and track perceived public confidence in vaccines. The index planned to be “based on a select number of factors identified from extensive analysis of areas of both low and high vaccine coverage.” [3, 4]  Australia‘s VCI rating.

On July 18, 2012 at the Society for Risk Analysis World Congress themed “Risk and Development in a Changing World” [7] held in Sydney Australia, Dr Heidi Larson presented “Addressing the Vaccine Confidence Gap“, which is based on her June 2011 Lancet paper. [5]   She emphasises vaccine Confidence is a “global issue” as more and more people from all parts of society are questioning vaccines, spurred on by the internet, including anti-vaccination groups in South Africa, vaccine boycotts in Nigeria, physicians and politicians.  In 2011 they knew that information alone would not sway the confidence, and vaccine policy would need to be employed, (such as No Jab-No Play, No Jab-No Pay, No Jab-No Job!) but also realised too much information could be detrimental to confidence.

By 2015, the Vaccine Confidence Project™ launched it’s official Vaccine Confidence Index (VCI)™ and the Wellcome Global Monitor included questions based on the VCI™ to measure public trust in the safety, effectiveness, and importance of vaccines.” VCI is “a monitoring system to diagnose early warning signs of confidence volatility and public health threats.” [1, 2]

VCP states: “Through mapping global vaccine confidence, we can more easily quantify changing attitudes towards the importance, safety, effectiveness and religious compatibility of vaccines, and policy-makers can harness this data to inform international strategy and global health goals.” In other words to produce persuasive marketing documents i.e. propaganda!

“The VCI will be an aid to immunization programmes at both design and execution levels for new and routine vaccines, directing more explicitly where to target both human and financial resources.”

At the WHO Vaccine Safety Summit in Dec 2019 Dr Larson of the VSP admits some alarming facts.

  • Around June 2023 Heidi Larson launched a new initiative called the Global Listening Project (GLP) to improve public trust in crisis preparedness.