Combating climate-induced health threats through Co-Constitutive Risk (CCR) Messaging: A One Health Communication approach.

Climate-facilitated spread of mosquito-borne pathogens to new environments elevates the importance of policies that limit greenhouse gas emissions as well as the development and uptake of new pharmaceutical interventions. Whereas past research attempts to bolster support for both through either climate or health risk communication, fewer attempt to combine the risks borne by climate change and infectious disease with a single messaging intervention, i.e.

Objective numeracy exacerbates framing effects from decision-making under political risk.

While Prospect Theory helps to explain decision-making under risk, studies often base frames on hypothetical events and fail to acknowledge that many individuals lack the ability and motivation to engage in complex thinking. We use an original survey of US adults (N = 2813) to test Prospect Theory in the context of the May 2023 debt ceiling negotiations in the US Congress and assess whether objective numeracy moderates framing effects. We hypothesize and find evidence to suggest that most respondents are risk-averse to potential gains and risk-accepting to potential losses; however, high numerates are more risk-averse and risk-accepting to gains and losses, respectively, than low numerates.

What Goes Down Must Come Up? Pandemic- Related Misinformation Search Behavior During an Unplanned Facebook Outage.

Pundits and scholars alike suspect that Facebook plays a role in not only exposing Americans to misinformation, but also encouraging them to seek out misinformation from other sources. Whether or not Facebook is responsible for stimulating misinformation search beyond the social networking site, however, is an open question. If Facebook encourages misinformation search behavior, we might expect search volume on other websites to simultaneously decrease when web traffic to Facebook is comparatively low.

Sick as a dog? The prevalence, politicization, and health policy consequences of canine vaccine hesitancy (CVH).

Canine vaccine hesitancy (CVH) can be thought about as dog owners' skepticism about the safety and efficacy of administering routine vaccinations to their dogs. CVH is problematic not only because it may inspire vaccine refusal - which may in turn facilitate infectious disease spread in both canine and human populations - but because it may contribute to veterinary care provider mental/physical health risks. In a nationally representative survey of US adults (N = 2200), we introduce a novel survey-based instrument for measuring CVH.

Religious affiliation and philosophical and moral beliefs about vaccines: A longitudinal study.

How do religious affiliation and beliefs shape vaccine attitudes and behaviors? This study examined the associations of attitudes and behaviors relevant to the flu, measles-mumps-rubella (MMR), and human-papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines with religious affiliations, as well as philosophical, spiritual, and moral beliefs. Respondents were 3005 adults from a probability-based, four-wave panel survey in the United States. Longitudinal structural equation modeling examined how religious affiliations and philosophical/moral beliefs shaped attitudes toward vaccines and actual vaccination.

Quantifying the effect of Wakefield et al. (1998) on skepticism about MMR vaccine safety in the U.S.

Background: Efforts to trace the rise of childhood vaccine safety concerns in the US often suggest Andrew Wakefield and colleagues' retracted 1998 Lancet study (AW98)-which alleged that the MMR vaccine can cause children to develop autism-as a primary cause of US vaccine skepticism. However, a lack of public opinion data on MMR safety collected before/after AW98's publication obscures whether anecdotal accounts are indicative of a potentially-causal effect.

Methods: We address this problem using a regression discontinuity framework to study change in monthly MMR injury claims (N = 74,850; from 1990-2019) from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) to proxy concern about vaccine safety.

The effects of scientific messages and narratives about vaccination.

A fundamental challenge complicates news decisions about covering vaccine side effects: although serious vaccine side effects are rare, less severe ones do occur occasionally. The study was designed to test whether a side effect message could induce vaccine hesitancy and whether that could be countered by pro-vaccine messages about vaccine safety. A large (N = 2,345), nationally representative experiment was conducted by randomly exposing participants to one of six videos about the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine edited from news programs produced during the 2019 measles outbreak in the United States.

Policy Views and Negative Beliefs About Vaccines in the United States, 2019.

To determine whether holding vaccine misconceptions, in the form of negative beliefs about vaccines, correlates with opposing governmental action at all levels designed to increase vaccination (e.g., removing personal belief and religious vaccine exemptions).