Abstract
Mass vaccination campaigns have been implemented worldwide to counteract the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic, however their effectiveness could be challenged by vaccine hesitancy. The tremendous rise in the use of social media have made them acquire a leading role as an information source, thus representing a crucial factor at play that could contribute to increase or mitigate vaccine hesitancy, as information sources play a pivotal role in shaping public opinion and perceptions. The aims of the study were to investigate if information sources could affect the attitude towards COVID-19 vaccination and if they could act as a mediator in the relationship between individual characteristics and vaccine hesitancy. A cross-sectional online survey was conducted by a professional panellist on a representative sample of 1011 citizens from the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy in January 2021. A mediation analysis using structural equation modelling was performed. Our results show how social media directly or indirectly increases vaccine hesitancy towards COVID-19 vaccination, while the opposite effect was observed for institutional websites. Given the global widespread use of social media, their use should be enhanced to disseminate scientifically sound information to a greater audience to counteract vaccine hesitancy, while at the same time continuing to promote and update institutional websites that have proven to be effective in reducing vaccine hesitancy.
Highlights
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused profound changes in daily life and shifted collective priorities, with incalculable and in some cases unforeseeable damage that has yet to fully unravel, and in mid-2021, after about a year and a half since its onset, is still a threat to individual health and society
This strategy has been met with some success, as the effect of growing rates of immunized people have appeared to have had an impact on epidemiological curves in Israel and the United Kingdom (UK) and on disease severity in the United States (US) [1,2,3]
As the purpose of COVID-19 vaccination campaigns turned from containing an emergency to providing a reliable and constant defence against further menace to people and health systems, reaching and maintaining high rates of immunization became of the utmost importance
Summary
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused profound changes in daily life and shifted collective priorities, with incalculable and in some cases unforeseeable damage that has yet to fully unravel, and in mid-2021, after about a year and a half since its onset, is still a threat to individual health and society. As the efforts to devise course-changing therapies have not yet come as far as to represent a viable strategy in containing the pandemic, most countries have mainly relied on mass vaccination campaigns to curb its harmful consequences This strategy has been met with some success, as the effect of growing rates of immunized people have appeared to have had an impact on epidemiological curves in Israel and the United Kingdom (UK) and on disease severity in the United States (US) [1,2,3]. As the purpose of COVID-19 vaccination campaigns turned from containing an emergency to providing a reliable and constant defence against further menace to people and health systems, reaching and maintaining high rates of immunization became of the utmost importance In this light, vaccine hesitancy has the potential to greatly complicate the attempts to reach the estimated threshold for population level immunity [4]. Vaccine hesitancy has reached worrying proportions, slowing down attempts to reach high rates of immunization [6] and reducing vaccination coverage to the extent of causing outbreaks of infectious diseases which had been under controls for years, as is in the case of several measles outbreaks in the UK [7] and the US [8], inducing the WHO to define it as one of the major global health concerns in 2019 [9]
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