Abstract
As safe and effective vaccines become widely available, attaining herd immunity and limiting the spread of COVID-19 will depend on individuals choosing to vaccinate—and doing so quickly enough to outpace mutations. Using online surveys conducted across six Latin American countries in January 2021, we experimentally assess messages designed to counteract informational deficiencies and collective action problems that may drive hesitancy. We first find that basic vaccine information persuades around 8% of hesitant individuals to become willing to vaccinate, reduces intended wait to vaccinate by 0.4 months, and increases willingness to encourage others to vaccinate. Rather than facilitating free riding, learning, or social conformity, additional information about others’ behavior increases vaccine acceptance when respondents expect herd immunity will be achieved. Finally, priming the social approval benefits of vaccinating also increases vaccine acceptance. These results suggest that providing information and shaping social expectations and incentives could both significantly increase vaccine uptake.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has inflicted significant suffering across the globe, but the rapid development and production of safe and effective vaccines provides the basis for emergent mass vaccination campaigns to contain the pandemic
In addition to increasing willingness to vaccinate, panel C shows that vaccine information reduced the average time that a respondent would wait to vaccinate by 0.41 months, or about 0.1 standard deviations of the control group distribution
Panel D further shows that vaccine information increased the probability that respondents would encourage others to get vaccinated by 0.037 probability points
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has inflicted significant suffering across the globe, but the rapid development and production of safe and effective vaccines provides the basis for emergent mass vaccination campaigns to contain the pandemic. Though vaccines have become widely available in the Global North, the success of mass vaccination campaigns will depend on sufficiently large numbers of people in every part of the world choosing to get vaccinated to prevent the spread of the virus and facilitate the return of normal life. Since it is essential for vaccination to outpace virus mutations, it matters both if and when populations are willing to vaccinate. Polls conducted between mid 2020 and early 2021 generally suggest that fewer than 75% of individuals are willing to get vaccinated in many countries [3,4,5,6,7,8].
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