When researchers asked Australian parents whether they had heard anything recently about childhood vaccination that worried them, one in seven (14%) said yes.
They reported hearing misinformation including a debunked link between childhood immunisation and autism, as well as disparaging comments about vaccines made by Donald Trump, the US president, leading researchers to suspect that many messages coming out of the US were cutting through.
Amid this noise, some parents concluded that if childhood vaccination “was 100% safe, there wouldn’t be all this contradictory information circulating”, said Dr Jess Kaufman, the National Vaccination Insights project lead researcher.
It in part explains why the 2025 survey released this week showed that parents were less accepting of routine childhood vaccines than they were last year.
The nationally representative survey of more than 2,000 parents of children under five in 2024 found that practical difficulties parents face such as cost and travel were the most significant reasons for not vaccinating children, but in 2025 the survey revealed that parents were now more influenced by beliefs and concerns about the vaccines themselves.
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Across the parents surveyed, a reported lack of trust in information from healthcare providers rose from 6.4% to 8.8%, while those who reported not believing that vaccines were safe rose from 6% to 8.3%.
The group with the most substantial increases in concerns compared with last year were parents of partly vaccinated children, meaning their children got some vaccines but not others, Kaufman said.
“What I do think the information environment does is it amplifies and validates people’s concerns. So people who are on the fence already might be finding a lot more messaging that aligns with their worries and that can make them a little bit more hesitant,” Kaufman said.
The record high rate of childhood vaccination Australia achieved in 2020 – surpassing the government’s target of 95%, which provides “herd immunity” – has declined in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic, with the most recent government data showing that only 93.17% of all five-year-olds are fully vaccinated, 89.57% of two-year-olds and 91.54% of one-year-olds.
Between the ages of two months and five years, Australian children can receive free vaccines through the government’s National Immunisation Program, which covers 18 vaccine-preventable diseases, including hepatitis B, diphtheria, whooping cough, meningococcal, polio, mumps, measles and rubella.
Many states have had an increased risk of some of these diseases, especially measles, as people return from overseas holidays in countries where there are outbreaks.
Like in the US, where a measles outbreak occurred in the Mennonite community in Texas, Prof Catherine Bennett, Deakin University chair of epidemiology, said Australia has seen an expansion of networks in our population less likely to get vaccinated.
If someone in one of these communities were to catch measles – which is caused by one of the world’s most infectious known viruses – the disease could move into a community quite quickly but “it’s down to luck now that we aren’t seeing more local transmission”, Bennett said.
Dr Michael Wright, the president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP), said: “One of the difficulties is, as over time vaccines have been so successful that many of us have never seen kids who have been crippled with polio or people who’ve gotten incredibly sick or died from measles.”
“We certainly don’t want to go back to a state where those vaccine preventable diseases reappear, which is what we’ve seen recently with some measles cases in New South Wales,” Wright said.
The 2025 survey found that the most reported parental barrier to vaccinating children in 2025 was feeling distressed about vaccinating (32%), although that included parents who still chose to do so.
Wright said all GPs understand that parents can have concerns about vaccines and find the process distressing but emphasised “the distress of the vaccine is nothing compared to catching one of these diseases if you’re unfortunate to get one”.
With misinformation rife online, “or even just information that might need to be interpreted to understand is it appropriate for you”, Wright encouraged parents who have read anything that concerns them to have conversations with their GP.
Kaufman said the partly vaccinated group especially presented a key opportunity for intervention because they were often sitting on the fence but “really anyone across the spectrum can have questions about vaccines – even [parents whose children] are fully vaccinated”.
Tailored strategies are needed to rebuild trust and ensuring supportive, empathetic conversations with healthcare providers who can respond to parents’ concerns, Kaufman said.
“A key aspect of improving trust in the health system is delivering good quality, consistent and accessible services,” Kaufman said.
The health minister, Mark Butler, said governments across the world were grappling with the “alarming” decline in childhood vaccination.
“The Australian government is engaging immunisation experts about reinforcing the message to parents and [improving] access and affordability to increase vaccination rates,” he said.