E-Paper
Misinformation may hit vaccination drive: Study
Misinformation about vaccines could threaten the goal of herd immunity to Covid-19, according to the findings of a first-of-its-kind experiment in which thousands of people in the US and UK became less willing to take doses once they were exposed to myths about vaccine safety and potential harm
Misinformation about vaccines could threaten the goal of herd immunity to Covid-19, according to the findings of a first-of-its-kind experiment in which thousands of people in the US and UK became less willing to take doses once they were exposed to myths about vaccine safety and potential harm.
The researchers carried out a randomised controlled trial with 8,001 people, of which 6,001 (split into groups of 3,000 in the UK and 3,001 in the US) were exposed to misinformation and their willingness to take a vaccine was recorded before and after the exposure. They found that willingness to take a vaccine dropped by an aggregate of 6.2 percentage points in the UK and 6.4 points in the US.
“The most crucial takeaway is that we need to be cautious about the role of misinformation on uptake rates. While it’s unlikely to have an overwhelming impact, it might serve to lower immunisation rates enough to threaten herd immunity goals,” Alex de Figueiredo, one of the lead authors, told HT over email. Figueiredo is the statistics lead on the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
Vaccine scepticism has been a persistent problem in several countries for years, but it is now a centre-stage issue since widespread inoculation at present is the only way to beat back the pandemic. The study, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour on Friday, is the first to use a randomised controlled trial to quantify how misinformation can make this worse.
The authors found that while willingness decreased across all groups – whether split by age, gender, or educational qualifications – there were some differences among groups. “Some groups in the US appear to be more vulnerable to Covid-19 vaccine misinformation, such as women and high-income groups; while Jewish respondents are more robust than Christians in the UK,” said Imperial College London researcher Sahil Loomba, who also led the study.
“Also, while there is no evidence that individuals who trust health authorities or scientists are any more or less likely to be impacted by misinformation, trust in non-expert sources of info seemed to be relevant. In particular, trust in celebrities in the UK is associated with robustness, whereas trust in family and friends in the US is associated with susceptibility to misinformation,” Loomba said to HT in an interaction over email.
Misinformation on online media has arisen as a growing threat on multiple aspects, including politics and law and order. In 2017. Misinformation spread through communication tools triggered a spate of lynchings in Indian villages when people were falsely led to believe that gangs were out to abduct children. Similarly, targeted falsified information, or disinformation, is believed to have manipulated to some extent the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election in 2016.
“There has been widely circulating false information about the pandemic on social media platforms, such as that 5G mobile networks are linked with the virus, that vaccine trial participants have died after taking a candidate COVID-19 vaccine, and that the pandemic is a conspiracy or a bioweapon,” the researchers note in their paper.
The problem appears to be less acute in India, but the effects still demonstrate the risks. “Indeed, India also seems to have high confidence in a Covid-19 vaccine. We recently analysed data from a 32 country survey on intent to accept a vaccine and India ranked second with 90.7% (95% credible interval, 88.1 to 93.2) of respondents stating that they would “definitely” or “probably” take a vaccine. India was only behind Vietnam (96.8%),” said Figueiredo.
In India, the average turnout during the coronavirus vaccination that began on January 16 has hovered around 50% of the targets. Health ministry data from February 7 showed there had been 5.8 million vaccinations in 116,478 sessions. This translates to roughly 50 people turning up for each session on average, against a target of 100.
Loomba said that effect of misinformation appeared to be correlated to the message seeming scientific. “For example, the image with the largest impact on UK respondents had shared the following: “scientists have expressed doubts over the effectiveness of a coronavirus vaccine that has been rushed to human trials, after all the monkeys used in initial testing later contracted coronavirus,” which espouses concerns of vaccine safety upon “rushed” procedures.”
This, he said, could be similar to a case where the approval of some vaccines may have appeared rushed, or the conversations around them focussed on serious side-effects. “It is crucial that any vaccine candidate must prove safe and efficacious as per established standards of scientific scrutiny before receiving regulatory approval, else it may induce undue vaccine hesitancy.”
