Should Communication Campaigns Promoting Vaccination Address Misinformation Beliefs? Implications from a Nationally Representative Longitudinal Survey Study among U.S. Adults

Abstract

Public health communication campaign planners must carefully consider whether misinformation beliefs are important to target and, ideally, correct. Guided by the reasoned action approach, we hypothesized that behavior-specific beliefs regarding COVID-19 vaccination would account for any observed relationship between general coronavirus misinformation beliefs (misinformation beliefs that are not specific to the anticipated consequences of COVID-19 vaccination) and subsequent vaccine uptake. To test our hypothesis, we used panel data from a two-wave nationally representative sample of U.S. adults pre- and post-vaccine availability (T1: July 2020, T2: April/June 2021, analytic sample: n = 665). Contrary to our hypothesis, we find a residual observed relationship between general coronavirus misinformation beliefs and subsequent vaccine uptake (AOR = 0.40, SE = 0.10). Intriguingly, our post-hoc analyses do show that after also adjusting for T2 behavioral beliefs, this association was no longer significant. With this and other justifications, we recommend that messages promoting vaccination prioritize targeting relevant behavioral beliefs.