Can shared decision making address COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy?

Background The COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect millions of people worldwide. While hygiene, behavioural measures and government-driven restrictions are in place, a globally implemented vaccination programme shows promise at mitigating the levels of illness and mortality caused by the virus.1 The exceptional magnitude of the pandemic, combined with the unprecedented speed of vaccine development has caused difficulty ensuring that information is neutral, standardised, coherent and evidence-based.2 As a result, misinformation about the virus and the COVID-19 vaccine, often combined with conspiracy theories, has become a major threat to uptake.3–5 A recent study about COVID-19 misinformation in national samples across five countries showed that misinformation negatively affected people’s self-reported compliance with public health recommendations and reduced people’s willingness to get vaccinated and recommend the vaccine to others.3 Misinformation increases vaccine hesitancy and threatens cooperation with vaccination programmes....
Source: Evidence-Based Medicine - Category: Internal Medicine Authors: Tags: COVID-19 EBM opinion and debate Source Type: research