skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Media use and vaccine resistance
Abstract Public health requires collective action—the public best addresses health crises when individuals engage in prosocial behaviors. Failure to do so can have dire societal and economic consequences. This was made clear by the disjointed, politicized response to COVID-19 in the United States. Perhaps no aspect of the pandemic exemplified this challenge more than the sizeable percentage of individuals who delayed or refused vaccination. While scholars, practitioners, and the government devised a range of communication strategies to persuade people to get vaccinated, much less attention has been paid to where the unvaccinated could be reached. We address this question using multiple waves of a large national survey as well as various secondary data sets. We find that the vaccine resistant seems to predictably obtain information from conservative media outlets (e.g. Fox News) while the vaccinated congregate around more liberal outlets (e.g. MSNBC). We also find consistent evidence that vaccine-resistant individuals often obtain COVID-19 information from various social media, most notably Facebook, rather than traditional media sources. Importantly, such individuals tend to exhibit low institutional trust. While our results do not suggest a failure of sites such as Facebook's institutional COVID-19 efforts, as the counterfactual of no efforts is unknown, they do highlight an opportunity to reach those who are less likely to take vital actions in the service of public health.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2241886 2116631
PAR ID:
10497660
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ;
Editor(s):
Mutz, Diana
Publisher / Repository:
PNAS Nexus
Date Published:
Journal Name:
PNAS Nexus
Volume:
2
Issue:
5
ISSN:
2752-6542
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; (, Journal of Risk Research)
    Wardman, Jamie (Ed.)
    Currently, one of the most pressing public health challenges is encouraging people to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Due to limited supplies, some people have had to wait for the COVID-19 vaccine. Consumer research has suggested that people who are overlooked in initial distribution of desired goods may no longer be interested. Here, we therefore examined people’s preferences for proposed vaccine allocation strategies, as well as their anticipated responses to being overlooked. After health-care workers, most participants preferred prioritizing vaccines for high-risk individuals living in group-settings (49%) or with families (29%). We also found evidence of reluctance if passed over. After random assignment to vaccine allocation strategies that would initially overlook them, 37% of participants indicated that they would refuse the vaccine. The refusal rate rose to 42% when the vaccine allocation strategy prioritized people in areas with more COVID-19 – policies that were implemented in many areas. Even among participants who did not self-identify as vaccine hesitant, 22% said they would not want the vaccine in that case. Logistic regressions confirmed that vaccine refusal would be largest if vaccine allocation strategies targeted people who live in areas with more COVID-19 infections. In sum, once people are overlooked by vaccine allocation, they may no longer want to get vaccinated, even if they were not originally vaccine hesitant. Vaccine allocation strategies that prioritize high-infection areas and high-risk individuals in group-settings may enhance these concerns. 
    more » « less
  2. (, PNAS nexus)
    Public sentiment toward the COVID-19 vaccine as expressed on social media can interfere with communication by public health agencies on the importance of getting vaccinated. We investigated Twitter data to understand differences in sentiment, moral values, and language use between political ideologies on the COVID-19 vaccine. We estimated political ideology, conducted a sentiment analysis, and guided by the tenets of moral foundations theory (MFT), we analyzed 262,267 English language tweets from the United States containing COVID-19 vaccine-related keywords between May 2020 and October 2021. We applied the Moral Foundations Dictionary and used topic modeling and Word2Vec to understand moral values and the context of words central to the discussion of the vaccine debate. A quadratic trend showed that extreme ideologies of both Liberals and Conservatives expressed a higher negative sentiment than Moderates, with Conservatives expressing more negative sentiment than Liberals. Compared to Conservative tweets, we found the expression of Liberal tweets to be rooted in a wider set of moral values, associated with moral foundations of care (getting the vaccine for protection), fairness (having access to the vaccine), liberty (related to the vaccine mandate), and authority (trusting the vaccine mandate imposed by the government). Conservative tweets were found to be associated with harm (around safety of the vaccine) and oppression (around the government mandate). Furthermore, political ideology was associated with the expression of different meanings for the same words, e.g. “science” and “death.” Our results inform public health outreach communication strategies to best tailor vaccine information to different groups. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; (, Journal of Public Health Management and Practice)
    Context:Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, state and local health departments served as risk communicators to the public; however, public health practitioners have limited resources at their disposal when trying to communicate information, especially when guidance is rapidly changing. Identifying how the population gathers information across channels and which subsets of the population utilize which channels can help practitioners make the best use of these limited resources. Objective:To identify how individuals utilized different information channels to get COVID-19–related information and determine its effect on one COVID-19–related action: vaccine intentions. Design:This study applies latent class analysis to utilization of information channels to characterize information consumption patterns during the COVID-19 infodemic and then explores the relationship between these patterns and vaccine hesitancy. Setting:The data were collected from theCOVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Survey, which is a nationally representative sample of US adults 18 years and older recruited from Social Science Research Solutions (SSRS)'s Opinion Panel. Participants:The online survey was conducted between April 7 and April 11, 2021, after the COVID-19 vaccine was available to all adults and enrolled more than 3000 respondents (n = 3014). Main Outcome Measure(s):Respondents were asked about their frequency of information seeking related to the COVID-19 vaccine, sociodemographics, and vaccine perceptions. Results:Based on fit statistics and prior research, we identified 6 latent classes that characterize information seeking: Nonseekers, Legacy, Legacy + Facebook/Instagram, Traditional Omnivore, Omnivore + Broad Social Media, and Twitter. Sociodemographics, political, economic, and COVID-19 exposure variables are associated with different patterns of seeking information about COVID-19. Membership in 3 of these classes was associated with higher rates of vaccine refusal and vaccine hesitancy. Discussion:The study has implications for public health officials and policymakers who use media channels to share news and health information with the public. Information should be tailored to the sociodemographic profiles of those users who are likely consuming information across multiple different channels. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; (, Bioethics)
    COVID‐19 vaccine uptake among healthcare workers (HCWs) remains of significant public health concern due to the ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic. As a result, many healthcare institutions are considering or have implemented COVID‐19 vaccine mandates for HCWs. We assess defenses of COVID‐19 vaccine mandates for HCWs from both public health and professional ethics perspectives. We consider public health values, professional obligations of HCWs, and the institutional failures in healthcare throughout the COVID‐19 pandemic which have impacted the lived experiences of HCWs. We argue that, despite the compelling urgency of maximizing COVID‐19 vaccine uptake among HCWs, the ethical case for COVID‐19 vaccine mandates for HCWs in the United States is complex, and, under current circumstances, inconclusive. Nevertheless, we recognize that COVID‐19 vaccine mandates for HCWs have already been and will continue to be implemented across many healthcare institutions. Given such context, we provide suggestions for implementing COVID‐19 vaccine mandates for HCWs. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ; (, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction)
    Social media platforms are frequently used to share information and opinions around vaccinations. The more often a message is reshared, the wider the reach of the message and potential influence it may have on shaping people’s opinions to get vaccinated or not. We used a negative binomial regression to investigate whether a message’s linguistic characteristics (degree of concreteness, emotional arousal, and sentiment) and user characteristics (political ideology and number of followers) may influence users’ decisions to reshare tweets related to the COVID-19 vaccine. We analyzed US English-language tweets related to the COVID-19 vaccine between May 2020 and October 2021 (N = 236,054). Tweets with positive and high-arousal words were more often retweeted than negative, low-arousal tweets. Tweets with abstract words were more often retweeted than tweets with concrete words. In addition, while Liberal users were more likely to have tweets with a positive sentiment reshared, Conservative users were more likely to have tweets with a negative sentiment reshared. Our results can inform public health messaging on how to best phrase vaccine information to impact engagement and information resharing, and potentially persuade a wider set of people to get vaccinated. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email