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Sharing our emerging work on vaccine confidence, broader lockdown attitudes, and trust – the ESRC-funded Covid and After: Trust and Perceptions study @BobbyDuffyKings @dr_d_allington @vivienne_mh: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/belief-in-covid-conspiracies-linked-with-vaccine-hesitancy /1
In November we resurveyed participants in the Kings Policy Institute @IpsosMORI 'Life Under Lockdown' surveys. We examined attitudes towards vaccines, reasons for vaccine hesitancy, and changes in attitudes between May/July and November/December. /2
Vaccine attitudes hardened slightly between July and Nov-Dec. We also found that vaccine-related conspiracism and conspiracist suspicions were not majority views, but equally not as rare as might be expected https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/coronavirus-conspiracies-and-views-of-vaccination.pdf /3
The findings on conspiracy endorsement are important for two reasons. They capture distrust and disconnect from traditional authority sources, and also reflect the efforts of bad-faith actors working to disrupt vaccine confidence. /4
Conspiracist narratives are extremely flexible, and easy and cheap to produce and disseminate widely. Conspiracist narratives evolve to target the deepest-felt instincts and taboos of different groups, and members of less-advantaged groups are particularly vulnerable to them. /5
Those relying more heavily on social media information sources in our dataset tend to be more vaccine-hesitant, and more likely to endorse Covid-related conspiracies. Social media platforms have responsibilities both to platform users and to public health as a public good. /6
In our dataset, members of younger age groups are more vaccine hesitant, but education enhances confidence, particularly among younger age groups. Women tend to be more hesitant than men, and ethnic minority group members more than White ethnic group members. /7
