Abstract
ObjectivesCompare lay expectations of medical development to those of experts in the context of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development.MethodsA short online survey of experts and lay people measuring when participants believe important vaccine milestones would occur and how likely potential setbacks were. Samples of US and Canadian lay people recruited through Qualtrics. The expert sample was created through a contact network in vaccine development and supplemented with corresponding authors of recent scholarly review articles on vaccine development.ResultsIn aggregate, lay people gave responses that were within 3 months of experts, tending to be later than experts for early milestones and earlier for later milestones. Median lay best estimates for when a vaccine would be available to the public were 08/2021 and 09/2021 for the US and Canadian samples, compared with 09-10/2021 for the experts. However, many individual lay responses showed more substantial disagreement with expert opinions, with 54% of lay best estimates of when a vaccine would be available to the public being before the median expert soonest estimate or after the median expert latest estimate. Lay people were much more pessimistic about vaccine development encountering setbacks than experts (median probability 59% of boxed warning compared with only 30% for experts). Misalignment between layperson and expert expectations was not explained by any demographic variables collected in our survey.ConclusionMedian lay expectations were generally similar to experts. At the individual level, however, lay people showed substantial variation with many believing milestones would occur much sooner than experts. Lay people were in general much more pessimistic about the prospect of setbacks than were experts.
Highlights
The lay public follows medical developments through news stories, social media and/or charitable organizations
Lay people were much more pessimistic about vaccine development encountering setbacks than experts
We report a comparison between the expectations of US and Canadian lay people and the previously published predictions of group of experts regarding timelines and potential setbacks for SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development as of the summer of 2020 [14]
Summary
The lay public follows medical developments through news stories, social media and/or charitable organizations. Many patients and their family members routinely scan media reports to learn about emerging treatment paradigms. Numerous commentators warn that hyperbolic news accounts may distort patient decision-making; they warn that expectations engendered by such coverage can lead to disappointment and disillusionment as promised advances fail to materialize on projected outcomes [5–7]. Embedded within such criticism, is an assumption that publics are passive and credulous consumers of media coverage of new medical treatments, or that misapprehensions about new medical technologies are not adequately buffered by other information sources
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