Herd thinking

Thank you for your remarks on COVID vaccination in your October editorial ‘Herd thinking’.¹ You are absolutely right that the positivist philosophical approach that some doctors might use to persuade patients of the benefits of vaccination is often not shared by the patients.

However, all is not lost. As I described in an article in your journal,² the way forward is to identify the patient’s explanatory perspective and, having identified it, to respond within that perspective. This is a technique that every successful salesman has learnt and which I make no claim to have invented. In the case of immunisation, many of the papers quoted in that article come from the World Health Organization ‘Sociology and Immunisation Project’, which has sponsored relevant research all over the world.

Much has been written and well written about immunisation since,³ but I do not think that this basic point has been superseded.

• © British Journal of General Practice 2020