An immunologist who grew up unvaccinated argues empathy, not facts alone, is key to overcoming vaccine hesitancy

At the age of 23, Elisabeth Marnik approached her doctor with an unusual request: vaccinate her against everything. She had never received a single vaccine, having been raised by a mother who distrusted science. Now, angry and defiant, she was turning away from the beliefs of her childhood. A doctor for adults does not typically have childhood immunizations on hand, so she made her way to a travel clinic and eventually received all the once-forbidden shots.

A year would pass before she told her mother about the vaccines, and several more years before Marnik came to feel sympathy for her mother's choices. That shift happened, as it so often does, when Marnik became a mother herself in 2019. A harrowing childbirth necessitated several blood transfusions. Overwhelmed and foggy-headed, Marnik balked when a nurse asked to give the baby a hepatitis B shot, saying she would do it later. A friend gently reminded her why it is important to vaccinate at birth, and the baby did receive the shot before leaving the hospital.

But Marnik had hesitated, and she was starting to understand her mother's burdens. "That moment, plus the whole entry into motherhood, really changed my perspective," Marnik said. "You have this immense pressure that if you don't do it right, things could happen. That really gave me more compassion."

A childhood shaped by vaccine distrust

Marnik's mother, Teresa Ryan, can still recall the pamphlet she came across decades ago. It described a healthy child who, after a series of vaccinations, started crying uncontrollably and running a high fever, and then went limp. The family's doctor merely stated that children must follow an immunization schedule, offering no balm for her worries. Ryan decided her two children would absolutely not get those shots.

That decision unfolded in the small town of Thomaston, Connecticut, where Liz lived with her mother and younger brother. The family's life revolved around an evangelical church in Waterbury. "Pretty much the only thing we did was go to church," she recalled. "I was all in."

Liz and her brother were pulled out of elementary school because students were about to read Harry Potter books, which involve stories of wizardry. They were not allowed to watch Disney movies or most secular television shows. Creation, they were told, literally occurred over seven days; science and scientists contradicted the Bible and could not be trusted.

But Liz had a hunger to learn. She persuaded her grandmother to buy her a homeschooling course, which she followed on her own for a year. Eventually she convinced her mother to enroll her in public school, starting with her junior year in high school. There she first encountered science, learning about atoms and calculating chemical reactions. She loved it.

At a teacher's urging, Liz applied to college and enrolled at Central Connecticut State University. She was so quiet and withdrawn as a freshman that her adviser, chemistry professor Barry Westcott, feared she would not make it to graduation. That changed, Westcott said, when she started research on genetics in a faculty member's laboratory "and then was suddenly a nearly 4.0 student."

A shift in perspective

In college, for the first time, Liz had friends who were not Christians and who held beliefs different from her own. But few knew much about what was happening in her own family back in Thomaston — until one morning near the end of her junior year.

"I remember that day vividly," said James Mulrooney, her biomolecular science professor. He found her sitting in the lobby of Nicolaus Copernicus Hall, sobbing. She had a flat tire, and Mulrooney and two other professors headed to the parking garage to try to change it.

Soon they learned more. She had been commuting 40 minutes each way to campus in a junk car, working at a dentist's office, and applying to graduate school, all while her mother and brother depended on her for transportation. As she watched three professors hack away at her car's rusted lug nuts, something shifted in her mind. She had been told that people outside her faith were evil, and yet her pastor's wife had turned her away while these scientists were literally bending over to help her. "It was that moment," she said, "where I saw the contradiction between these two kinds of people."

Her professors urged her to stick with her education and connected her with a school counselor. Their support eased her way to graduation in 2011. And when her graduate school asked for proof of vaccination, Marnik was finally ready to defy her upbringing and get the shots.

Marnik enrolled in a Ph.D. program offered by Tufts University but based at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, where she studied autoimmune disease in mice and published three research papers. By the time she started as a postdoctoral researcher at the MDI Biological Laboratory, she knew she would not pursue the typical next step of setting up her own lab. Much as she loved doing science, Marnik found herself most drawn to teaching people about it.

Breaking the information bubbles

Just how big her new chosen career would become became apparent in 2020, when the pandemic struck. "It was like my two worlds were colliding," Marnik said. "All of the people who were spreading misinformation about Covid-19 were people like my family that I had grown up with. … I felt a responsibility to kind of try to help navigate this moment."

She started posting on Facebook and Instagram as "@ScienceWhizLiz," where she now has 64,000 followers, and 4,500 subscribers on her Substack, the Science Classroom. She contributed to Those Nerdy Girls (搜索)搜索该词条, a group of women and non-binary people who provide health information online, and is now their chief scientific officer.

In 2025, the "Your Local Epidemiologist" newsletter spawned The Evidence Collective (搜索)搜索该词条, and Marnik was hired as executive director this year. The collective produces briefs on current scientific topics — such as the hantavirus and changes to the vaccine schedule — to speed the dissemination of accurate information by science communicators and journalists. It also holds in-person meetings with online content creators who have lay followers, seeking to "break echo chambers" in which scientists are reading each other's posts but not reaching beyond.

In one daylong meeting, Marnik convened "mom scientists" with "mom influencers" to teach the influencers how to talk about science and public health. In another, she had scientists team up with religious leaders to help them share public health concepts that align with their faith values, developing a pamphlet on faith-based messaging to encourage measles (搜索)搜索该疾病 vaccination.

"People who have faith don't always see that it conflicts with science," Marnik said. "It's scientists who tend to feel like you can't do both."

Facts alone are not enough

Marnik's central argument is that facts alone rarely change minds. "There is tons of data that shows facts alone are not enough to do it, and I think this is the hard part," she said. "I'm not saying facts are not important. They are deeply important, but facts alone are not enough. If they were, we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place."

She points to the power of storytelling. "Information embedded in a story not only helps people remember it more, but also makes it so they're more likely to act on that information," she said. Yet scientists and medical providers are often not trained in science communication. "I was never trained on how to talk to the public about science, and that is not an uncommon thing."

Marnik urges clinicians and advocates to abandon the expectation of changing someone's mind in a single conversation. "You should actually never go into one conversation thinking you're gonna change somebody's mind," she said. "It takes building relationships and having multiple conversations over a time." Her own change of heart occurred only after many talks with kind, attentive friends and professors over four years of college.

"People tell me, 'I'm not going to engage with people that I disagree with because it's a waste of time,'" Marnik told an audience at the Huntington Theatre in Boston. "And then I ask them, 'Well, what did you do?' And they told me they had a 5- to 10-minute conversation, and they didn't change the person's mind. I'm like, 'It's not going to happen in a 5- to 10-minute conversation.'"

Empathy and boundaries can coexist

Marnik does not oppose vaccine mandates. "School immunization requirements have a long history of increasing vaccine uptake, and in places especially right now where we see measles (搜索)搜索该疾病 increasing, that's a really important thing," she said.

But she argues there is a misconception in empathetic communication that empathy precludes boundaries. "You can be deeply empathetic about somebody having a hard time making a decision... and have a boundary that says, 'You are allowed to not make this decision.'" For example, a parent may choose not to vaccinate a child, but that means the child cannot attend a particular school. "There can be both boundaries and empathy at the same time."

She also cautions against viewing mandates as a complete solution. "I get worried that people are like, 'We'll just end religious exemptions, it will fix the problem,' when we're not thinking about how we converse about vaccines, and also making sure everyone has access." In some rural places, she notes, vaccine rates may be low not because of hesitancy but because families cannot get a ride to the clinic.

Marnik's views are widely shared among public health communicators. "She is a great voice for reason in a space that's very emotionalized," said Stefanie Friedhoff, co-founder and director of Brown University's Information Futures Lab. "She tells her own story. She doesn't claim it's true for everybody. And she brings evidence to the table."

Dorit Reiss, professor of law at the University of California, San Francisco, said that reasonable, thoughtful, caring parents can be sucked in by vaccine disinformation. "Anti-vaccine groups are very good at packaging what they're saying in convincing ways," said Reiss, whose research focuses on vaccine policy.

A mother's slow progress

Despite all Marnik's work, her mother, Teresa Ryan, has not changed her mind about vaccines. She fears the possible side effects more than any illness the vaccines would prevent. "Once you have that in your system, it's hard to do anything about it," Ryan said. "It's just not good for you. It's the way I feel."

Yet Ryan does not get the seasonal flu shot and has never been immunized against Covid-19, but she said she would take a shot if she were bit by a rabid animal or stepped on a rusty nail. And she has acknowledged the value of the measles (搜索)搜索该疾病 vaccine, given the severity of the illness.

Marnik calls this "progress," the result of an ongoing conversation that she urges others to pursue. She recalled a conversation about a year and a half ago in which she explained to her mother why measles (搜索)搜索该疾病 scares her — particularly because it is one of the only viruses known to erase some prior immune memory, with consequences for dying from other infections even after surviving measles. "She didn't know that. We didn't actually know this existed when I was born," Marnik said. "And she was like, 'Wow. I understand why the MMR vaccine查看药品详情 is important.'"

After Marnik's New York Times guest essay was published, her mother read it and loved it. "If somebody had treated me the way you were treated and the way you treat other people, I might have made a different decision," Ryan told her.

For Marnik, the lesson is clear. "I want people to choose to vaccinate their kid because I do believe the benefits of vaccines outweigh their risks, but yelling at them and calling them stupid and shoving facts at them is not gonna get us to that end goal that we have." She added, "If it wasn't for that prior version of me, I wouldn't be the me that I am now, right? I wouldn't be doing the work that I am doing."