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Designing to Combat COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy | Nature Scientific Reports

New Publication on Designing Information Visualizations to Summarize and Share COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Research with People Hesitant to Get Vaccinated

Dec 20, 2022

Despite the efficacy, safety, and availability of COVID-19 vaccines, a lack of awareness and trust of vaccine safety research remains an important barrier to public health. The goal of this research was to design and test online meta-summaries—transparent, interactive summaries of the state of relevant studies—to improve people’s awareness and opinion of vaccine safety research. We used insights from a set of co-design interviews (n = 22) to develop meta-summaries to highlight metascientific information about vaccine safety research. An experiment with 863 unvaccinated participants showed that our meta-summaries increased participants’ perception of the amount, consistency, and direction of vaccine safety research relative to the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) webpage, and that participants found them more trustworthy than the CDC page as well. They were also more likely to discuss it with others in the week following. We conclude that direct summaries of scientific research can be a useful communication tool for controversial scientific topics.

We conducted this study at the University of Washington with a joint team of researchers from the Schools of Engineering and Medicine. To read more about our study and see the meta-summary visualizations that we designed, you can access the peer-reviewed article in Nature Scientific Reports here.

A sample information visualization that reads "Being fully vaccinated and boosted can significantly reduce risk of Covid-19. Notably, scientific studies have shown that the Covid-19 vaccine reduces risk of hospitalization by about 90%." The graphic displays Covid-19 among 100 unvaccinated people versus 100 vaccinated people. It shows the following: Among the 100 unvaccinated people, 16 are asymptomatic, 53 have mild-moderate symptoms, 28 have mild-moderate long Covid symptoms, 2 are hospitalized, and 1 is dead. Meanwhile, among the 100 vaccinated people, 88 are asymptomatic, 10 have mild-moderate symptoms, and 2 have mild-moderate long Covid symptoms. 0 are hospitalized or dead. — Sample Meta-Summary Visualization