In early 2021, India saw one of its largest vaccination drives when it released the COVID vaccine and set out to vaccinate about 300 million priority groups against the virus. It has been over three years since then and Manju devi, a part time domestic help in the capital city of Delhi still believes that the vaccine is unsafe and also unnecessary. Despite numerous studies that have shown the vaccine to be safe and effective, she believes that natural immunity is better as the vaccine may also cause serious long term effects such as infertility. Similar perspectives are shared by Rahul Khanna, a middle aged working professional from the cosmopolitan city of Mumbai who believes that the vaccine was developed in a rush and is associated with long term heart diseases. Such myths and misconceptions are not uncommon when a new vaccine is launched or when an existing vaccine is brought to the forefront and pushed by the government.

In the latest budget announcement, the finance minister of India made its intentions of putting a concentrated effort to encourage the uptake of the HPV vaccine, which has been in the country for a decade, by adolescent girls very clear. The vaccine uptake has been particularly low due to its cost, which the government now intends to bring down by including it in its immunisation programme. While this is a positive move towards making India cervical cancer free, these efforts by the government can be undermined if misinformation and disinformation, as well as other behavioral biases that can affect uptake of the HPV vaccine persist.

Underinvestment in preventive health is a growing area of research which demonstrates that individuals deviate from the standard economic principle of rationality and under invest in high-return opportunities. In other words, research from behavioral science has shown that people significantly under-value or ignore the life-changing benefits of preventive health products like vaccinations, bed nets, prenatal care or water chlorination, and over exaggerate the short-term costs of effort and inconvenience, leading to low uptake. However, their willingness to pay for curative healthcare when their child is sick is exponentially higher. This intention-action gap is often a product of incorrect mental models, biassed beliefs, present bias and procrastination. For public health response plans to be effective, the heuristics and biases of the target population need to form the crux around which social mobilisation efforts are planned.