US-China vaccines collaboration leads to partisan distrust, study finds

LAWRENCE — Anti-vaccine sentiments are not new. But in recent years, attitudes toward vaccines have increasingly become more politicized along partisan lines. Accompanying such hesitancy is escalating distrust of China, which is where the COVID-19 epidemic originated. 

A new study titled “The politics of flu vaccines: international collaboration and political partisanship” examines the influence of international collaboration and vaccine developments on people’s attitudes toward vaccines.

“Interestingly, it was the collaboration between the U.S. and China that resulted in our annual flu vaccines,” said John James Kennedy, a professor of political science at the University of Kansas.

Despite the previously successful and effective U.S.-China collaboration in developing vaccines, Kennedy’s study finds that respondents are much less likely to receive a U.S.-China flu vaccine than ones created by a U.S.-Japan collaboration or U.S. alone. It appears in the Japanese Journal of Political Science.

Co-written with KU assistant professor of political science Jack Zhang, KU doctoral student Riago Liu and former KU doctoral students Haruka Nagao and William Hatungimana (currently of the University of Oklahoma), the survey’s results further suggest that Republicans are significantly less likely to accept an FDA-approved flu vaccine developed through U.S.-China collaboration than a flu vaccine developed through U.S.-Japan collaboration or the U.S. alone.

Historically, international collaboration has been critical to vaccine development, even with the general public being largely unaware of foreign involvement in the process.

“U.S.-China relations with medicine goes back to the 1900s,” said Kennedy, who also is chair of KU’s political science department.

“They’ve been collaborating specifically on vaccines for nearly 20 years. And it was through the World Health Organization (WHO) that they’ve been sharing the actual flu viruses -- because you have to share the virus to get a piece of that virus in order to create the vaccine.”

Kennedy’s team set up an experimental design that introduced four scenarios testing for vaccine nationalism, country-specific hypothesis and partisan hypothesis. More than 1,200 respondents were surveyed.

“We knew there would be resistance in the U.S. to vaccines from China. We also assumed we would likely see Democrat and Republican differences, in terms of the Republicans being much more anti-China. But the surprise was there was greater support for the Japanese collaboration. In fact, more people would rather take a U.S.-Japan vaccine than one made solely by the U.S.,” he said.

This surprising result wasn’t merely because of the eroding trust in the FDA coming from partisan influences.

“It’s also because of overall trust in Japanese products,” Kennedy said.

“Many cars driven in the U.S. are made by Japanese countries: Honda, Subaru, Toyota. Sony is a huge product, both in entertainment and things like headphones. Anime is extremely popular. And US-Japan relations together against China have been also prevalent. I think the trust in Japanese products over time has contributed to a trust in the vaccine.”

Kennedy revealed that the impetus for this study was the conflux of seeing news reports about the anti-China legislation in Kansas coupled with advertisements touting the flu vaccine.

“I was thinking, ‘Well, I wonder if people would take the flu vaccine if they really knew that China has been engaged with helping create it?’ Because we asked people in the survey, ‘Did you ever get a flu shot in the last 10 years?’ Almost everybody said yes — which means they’ve all been affected by this collaboration. But I thought the difference between knowing and not knowing would make an interesting survey experiment,” he said.

A Los Angeles native who has taught at KU since 2003, Kennedy is fluent in Mandarin and conducts research on Chinese local governance. His first book, “Lost and Found: The ‘Missing’ Girls in Rural China,” was published by Oxford in 2019.

“The politics of vaccines could have a real influence on our public health,” Kennedy said.

“If people are refusing to take vaccines for political reasons, rather than medical reasons, that is unusual. Distrust in the FDA plays a role in some of that. Pandemics are not going away — we were losing 30,000 to 50,000 people a year due to flu-related deaths before the pandemic. So I’m hoping the biggest takeaway of this research is that people will be less political when it comes to vaccine choices.”