Can the vaccine adverse event reporting system be used to increase vaccine acceptance and trust?
Section snippets
Participants and setting
A total of 1259 adults located in the USA participated in this study in exchange for $1 or $1.50, depending on whether they received the long or short form of the survey. Participants were recruited using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (Mturk), which is a population of adults who are willing to take surveys in exchange for a small amount of money. As of 2010, the Mturk population included over 500,000 individuals, with 39% located in the USA [16]. Research on this population has shown that it is more
Influence of interventions on vaccine acceptance and trust
Pre-measures of perceived vaccine risks and benefits indicated that 8.5% of participants reported low perceived benefits of the HPV vaccine (responded 0–50 on 100-point scale), and 31.7% reported high perceived risks (responded 50–100 on 100-point scale). This indicates that the sample had fairly positive evaluations of the vaccine's benefits, although a sizeable proportion of the sample held negative beliefs pertaining to vaccine risks.
Fig. 2 shows that in the VIS only condition 73% of
Discussion
The purpose of this study was to test an intervention that was intended to increase vaccine acceptance and trust by communicating that the CDC diligently records possible vaccine harms and disseminates this information to the public. The intervention was based on findings indicating that some individuals distrust the research and reporting about vaccine harms, and therefore we tested the possibility that open communication about VAERS would increase trust. Results showed that information about
Funding source
This research was funded by internal research funds from the University of Michigan provided to the last author.
Potential conflicts of interest: The authors have no conflicts of interest relevant to this article to disclose.
Financial Disclosure: The authors have no financial relationships relevant to this article to disclose.
Contributors’ statement
Dr Scherer conceptualized and designed the study, conducted the data analyses, drafted the initial manuscript, and approved the final manuscript as submitted.
Drs. Shaffer, Patel and Zikmund-Fisher conceptualized and designed the study, reviewed and revised the manuscript, and approved the final manuscript as submitted.
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