Vaccine hesitancy higher among those who get their news from social media

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-05-19 17:00

International

Those who are less likely to get a COVID-19 vaccine are more likely to be getting their news entirely or mostly through social media, according to a US study. Researchers looked at the media habits and opinions on the COVID-19 vaccine of 2,650 US residents. The group selected was more impacted by COVID-19 than the population average. Two in five participants were very likely to have the vaccine, just under half were somewhat hesitant and just over one in eight were very unlikely to take the vaccine. The study found those less likely to get the vaccine used social media as their sole source of information or as at least one of their sources of information, while traditional news sources like local and national TV and newspapers were associated with a higher willingness to be vaccinated.

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conference: PLOS One

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Organisation/s: Harvard School of Public Health, USA

Funder: This research was with funding support from Jigsaw, Google. RPL, ES, JK, BH, and CMI received funding from Jigsaw to conduct this research. BG and TV are employed by Jigsaw/Google. Google, Inc. provided support in the form of salaries for authors, BG TV, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contribution'. The data has been analyzed independently and the views expressed are those exclusively of the authors.

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