Direct and Spillover Effects of Provider Vaccination Facilitation

We explore physicians’ role in moderating compliance with recommended vaccinations. Using administrative data on the universe of Danish children and their healthcare providers, we first construct and validate a measure of providers’ propensities to facilitate recommended vaccinations from birth to age 6 based on a two-way fixed effects model. We then show that the measure meaningfully affects uptake of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine among adolescent patients and speeds recovery from a media-induced crisis to perceived HPV vaccine safety. Providers affect decisions beyond those of their own patients, influencing the uptake of patients’ younger cousins by one-fifth as much as own patients’ uptake.