Topic: Vaccine Hesitancy

This submission, from a leading international team of misinformation and public health researchers, sets out the evidence linking misinformation to declining childhood vaccine confidence in the UK.

How do we build trust in an era of misinformation, social media, and artificial intelligence? In this episode of Infectious IDeas, NFID CEO Rebecca Alvania, PhD, MA, MPH, and NFID Medical Director Robert H. Hopkins, Jr., MD, talk with Heidi J. Larson, PhD, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project.

“There has definitely been a growing number of people who question widely accepted scientific evidence,” says VCP Director Heidi Larson. “We’ve always had dissenters, but it’s been very much more on the fringe,” she says.

This study sought to explore public perceptions and feelings about the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic by governments and leading authorities in three European cities.

We are appalled to find that the content on the CDC webpage “Autism and Vaccines” has been changed and distorted, and is now filled with anti-vaccine rhetoric and outright lies about vaccines and autism, writes the Autism Science Foundation.

There’s no link between vaccines and autism, says The American Academy of Pediatrics. Anyone repeating this harmful myth is misinformed or intentionally trying to mislead parents. We call on the CDC to stop wasting government resources to amplify false claims that sow doubt in routine immunizations.

An extraordinary effort will be needed to sustain confidence in vaccines, given the unprecedented level of misinformation being propagated about them, even from official sources, writes Heidi J. Larson, Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted renewed emphasis on monitoring vaccine confidence. This study extends vaccine confidence surveillance to geographies where such research is limited. 

This study aims to expand the scope of HCPs’ vaccine confidence oversight into European regions where limited research has been conducted thus far.

The global health community faces a deepening challenge — not only from infectious diseases but also
from a pandemic of misinformation, argues VCP founder, Heidi J. Larson.

Listen to the CommonHealth Podcast by VCP partner The Centre for Strategic & International Studies to learn more about the Vaccine Integrity Project (VIP) – a new initiative spearheading responses to vaccine-related actions taken by the second Trump administration.

VCP founder Heidi J. Larson named one of the most dynamic business women shaping the future for her role in building bridges of trust in the fight against misinformation and vaccine hesitancy.