"Measuring the impact of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on vaccination intent in the UK and USA": Author correction

ABSTRACT

Reports an error in "Measuring the impact of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on vaccination intent in the UK and USA" by Sahil Loomba, Alexandre de Figueiredo, Simon J. Piatek, Kristen de Graaf and Heidi J. Larson (Nature Human Behaviour, 2021[Mar], Vol 5[3], 337-348). In the original article, reference number of the ethics application approved by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine ethics committee was incorrectly quoted. The correct number is 22647. Also, debriefing information was originally only provided in Supplementary Information. The following sentence has been added for clarification to the Methods section in the updated article "All respondents exposed to misinformation were debriefed after the survey;debriefing information can be found in the questionnaire included in Supplementary Information." These errors have been corrected in the PDF and HTML versions of this article. (The following of the original article appeared in record 2021-29746-012). [Correction Notice An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 5(7) of Nature Human Behaviour (see record 2021-69306-024). In the original article, the subscript for the gamma element in equation (7) should have been k rather than j;i.e., it should read as given in erratum. The error has been corrected in the PDF and HTML versions of this article.] Widespread acceptance of a vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) will be the next major step in fighting the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, but achieving high uptake will be a challenge and may be impeded by online misinformation. To inform successful vaccination campaigns, we conducted a randomized controlled trial in the UK and the USA to quantify how exposure to online misinformation around COVID-19 vaccines affects intent to vaccinate to protect oneself or others. Here we show that in both countries-as of September 2020-fewer people would 'definitely' take a vaccine than is likely required for herd immunity, and that, relative to factual information, recent misinformation induced a decline in intent of 6.2 percentage points (95th percentile interval 3.9 to 8.5) in the UK and 6.4 percentage points (95th percentile interval 4.0 to 8.8) in the USA among those who stated that they would definitely accept a vaccine. We also find that some sociodemographic groups are differentially impacted by exposure to misinformation. Finally, we show that scientific-sounding misinformation is more strongly associated with declines in vaccination intent. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)