Using Social Media to Build Confidence in Vaccines: Lessons from Community Engagement and Social Science Research in Africa comminit.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from comminit.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Sara Cooper and colleagues argue that a better understanding of the complex sociopolitical drivers of distrust in vaccination will increase the potential of social media to rebuild vaccine confidence
Vaccination experts have become increasingly alarmed about the continued waning of public confidence in vaccines.1 Social media are considered to be major contributors to this decline, facilitating the rapid and widespread sharing of misinformation, enabling vaccine anxieties and rumours to travel rapidly around the world.23 Social media are also seen to have enabled vocal anti-vaccination groups to self-organise and communicate well beyond their local areas.45 The covid-19 pandemic has only magnified these concerns,6 as Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization put it, “We’re not just fighting a pandemic; we’re fighting an infodemic.”7
This dominant narrative on mistrust in vaccines assumes that it is primarily the result of a lack of informa