Measuring the impact of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on vaccination intent in the UK and USA
1977/04/01 by Sahil Loomba, Alexandre de Figueiredo, Simon J. Piatek +3 · 77 citations
Engineering · Medicine · Social Sciences · #Engineering Applied Research #Misinformation and Its Impacts #SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 Research #Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy #Vibration and Dynamic Analysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41562-021-01056-1
openalex publication_date 2021/02/05 · openalex created_date 2021/02/15 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Abstract
Widespread acceptance of a vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) will be the next major step in fighting the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, but achieving high uptake will be a challenge and may be impeded by online misinformation. To inform successful vaccination campaigns, we conducted a randomized controlled trial in the UK and the USA to quantify how exposure to online misinformation around COVID-19 vaccines affects intent to vaccinate to protect oneself or others. Here we show that in both countries-as of September 2020-fewer people would 'definitely' take a vaccine than is likely required for herd immunity, and that, relative to factual information, recent misinformation induced a decline in intent of 6.2 percentage points (95th percentile interval 3.9 to 8.5) in the UK and 6.4 percentage points (95th percentile interval 4.0 to 8.8) in the USA among those who stated that they would definitely accept a vaccine. We also find that some sociodemographic groups are differentially impacted by exposure to misinformation. Finally, we show that scientific-sounding misinformation is more strongly associated with declines in vaccination intent.
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