Study: Highlighting harms of not being vaccinated could overcome hesitancy
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Key takeaways:
- Participants counseled on the potential harms of not being vaccinated had the highest probability of getting vaccinated.
- Loss was a more effective motivator than altruism.
Clinicians could help patients overcome vaccine hesitancy by highlighting the potential harms of not being vaccinated rather than emphasizing the benefits of a vaccine, according to a study published in the Journal of Public Health.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic may not be linked to overall changes in parental vaccine hesitancy, kindergarten vaccine rates in the United States have not returned to levels seen before the pandemic, and vaccine exemptions have reached an all-time high, according to data published last year by the CDC.
Based on the experience of some countries when launching the COVID-19 vaccines, Ke Feng, PhD, assistant professor at the Shenzhen Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and colleagues conducted an experiment testing how vaccines are framed to identify better methods of motivating people to get vaccinated.
“Previous studies on the impact of message frames on vaccination have rarely considered the different stages of vaccine launch,” Feng said in a press release. “This study explored the effect of information frames on vaccination in the late stage of vaccine launch when the vaccine is perceived to be effective,” Feng said.
Feng and colleagues recruited 1,085 people aged 18 years or older in China who had not been vaccinated against COVID-19 using an online survey. The researchers then randomly assigned them to one of three experimental groups testing three scenarios for recommending vaccines — altruism (277), egoism (263) or loss (276) — or a control group (269).
The researchers tailored messages for each group:
- All four groups received background information about the prevalence and mortality rate of COVID-19, and the three experimental groups each received framed messages designed to motivate them to get vaccinated.
- The egoism-framed group received messages that “vaccination can make you develop antibodies against COVID-19, thus reducing the likelihood of contracting COVID-19 and developing severe symptoms after infection.”
- The altruism-framed group received messages that “vaccination can promote the formation of community herd immunity, thereby reducing the likelihood of community members getting infected with COVID-19 and developing severe symptoms after infection.”
- The loss-framed group received messages that “if you are not vaccinated, you will not develop antibodies to COVID-19, and thus you will be more susceptible to COVID-19 and more likely to develop severe symptoms after infection.”
Overall, the researchers reported that the three experimental groups were more likely to accept a COVID-19 vaccine than the control, non-framed group, with the loss-framed group exhibiting the highest predicted probability of vaccination (72.63%) when they believed the vaccine was extremely effective, followed by the egoism group (65.67%), altruism group (62%) and the non-framed group (60.39%).
Feng and colleagues concluded that the study suggests enhancing recognition of the effectiveness of vaccines is important in promoting them, noting that properly framing promotional messages can improve vaccine uptake.
“Message frames can amplify the positive effect of perceived vaccine effectiveness on vaccination willingness in the late stage of vaccine launch,” they wrote.
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