It’s not quite that simple. In reality, I don’t think that the rampant anti vaxxers are that great in number … they just exert their influence by loud squawking and having a large footprint on social media. Not unlike, say, the cholesterol denialists/statin phobics or the anti GLP-1 agonist crowd.
Most parents who opt to avoid vaccines…outside of religious cults etc…are just like I was in the early 80s in many ways. As Ben Goldacre mentioned in one of the Grauniad links upstream, with anti vaxx sentiments, you can’t get the scaremongering toothpaste back in the tube. It’s an interesting aspect of personal risk assessment that folk have a higher tolerance for risks associated with “natural” events vs ones they perceive they’ve chosen for themselves. As in, taking a chance on not catching a disease and/or diminishing its severity (e.g. “I had measles and mumps as a kid and lived to tell the tale”), especially when prevalence is fairly low, vs the suspicion of a vaccine to prevent it because of a whole slew of sunningly rare or imagined potential side effects.
Even with the reality of high prevalence in the community and the fundamental understanding of how the fear of the pertussis shot was generated, I would be lying if I said I had no worries at all. I just had the gumption…and a bit more experience of the severity of Whooping Cough…than most.