I'm not throwing away my shot: increasing covid-19 vaccine confidence and decreasing disinformation within campus communities through student advocacy

Abstract

For the past two years, COVID-19 has held the world's attention. It's been challenging to get the world's citizens to reach herd immunity due to a lack of vaccine confidence. Although vaccines have been a very successful part of public health in recent and past decades, there has been much debate about the COVID-19 vaccine. Strategies must be implemented to address vaccine confidence and decrease disinformation as this can be extremely helpful in preventing infections and reducing the likelihood of transmission. Student advocacy may be helpful in restoring trust within the campus community. The study used a cross-sectional, descriptive design. The non-random sample included 85 students, faculty, and staff on the campus of a university in a southeastern state. Participants were recruited via flyers, at COVID-19 campus events, and by word of mouth. The Center for Control and Disease Prevention (CDC) Vaccine Confidence Survey Question Bank was used to measure vaccine confidence at baseline. The intervention consisted of exposing the campus community to factual COVID-19 through educational flyers, town hall meetings, TikTok® and other social media platforms. Upon completion of the study, the grant team created a video of their experiences with the vaccine, which was streamed to the campus community. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, frequencies and independent t-tests. Participants' ages ranged from 20-55 (M = 30; SD = 12.1), were mostly female (64.7%), and white (52.9%). More than three-fourths of the samples (76.4%) were students. Only 17.4% of the sample had a previous diagnosis of COVID-19. Nurses and local health officials were the most trusted sources of vaccine information. Due to being a state institution, we were not at liberty to discuss the vaccination status of the participants. However, many felt that people at their work or school (58.9%) or family or friends (64.7%) would not get the vaccine. The findings of this study support the need for innovative strategies to deliver factual COVID-19 vaccine information to the campus community. Most of the participants did practice social distancing and other preventative behaviors, but more than half felt that they had received inaccurate information about the vaccine or were not sure where to receive accurate information from. There is no single intervention to restore campus community confidence, but student advocacy was helpful in starting a discussion about COVID-19 vaccines and collecting necessary data to determine support for effective strategies.