Evidence on trends in uptake of childhood vaccines and association with COVID-19 vaccination rates.

Importance: Childhood vaccination rates have declined in recent years; there is also concern that resistance to COVID-19 vaccines could spill over to childhood vaccines.

Objectives: To use local-level data to study trends in childhood vaccination rates and heterogeneity in local rates; including how many areas are below herd-immunity thresholds, and assess the association between COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and childhood vaccination.

Design: We report, for 11 states with available data, vaccination rates for measles, mumps, rubella (MMR), and diphtheria, tetanus, acellular pertussis (DTaP) vaccines, including percentage of schools/counties with rates ≥95 %, 90-95 %, 80-90 %, and < 80 %.

Exogenous Increases in Basic Income Provisions Increase Preventive Health-Seeking Behavior: A Quasi-Experimental Study.

Introduction: Universal Basic Income (UBI) policies have the potential to promote a wide range of public health objectives by providing those who qualify with direct cash payments. One overlooked mechanism of particular importance to health researchers is the possibility that guaranteed income might increase consultation of primary and preventive care (e.g.

"Influencing the influencers:" a field experimental approach to promoting effective mental health communication on TikTok.

A substantial body of social scientific research considers the negative mental health consequences of social media use on TikTok. Fewer, however, consider the potentially positive impact that mental health content creators ("influencers") on TikTok can have to improve health outcomes; including the degree to which the platform exposes users to evidence-based mental health communication. Our novel, influencer-led approach remedies this shortcoming by attempting to change TikTok creator content-producing behavior via a large, within-subject field experiment (N = 105 creators with a reach of over 16.

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.

How pandemic-related changes in global attitudes toward the scientific community shape "post-pandemic" environmental opinion.

Low public concern about anthropogenic climate change (ACC)-due in part to distrust in the scientific community-may decrease demand for policies aimed at mitigating its deleterious effects. Encouragingly, though, recent research finds that experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic has elevated trust in scientific expertise worldwide. We explore the possibility that positive attitudes toward the medical community are "spilling over" to increase ACC acceptance via globally representative survey data from 107 countries ( = 119,088) conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pre-political origins and policy consequences of environmental justice concern.

While the effects of climate change will impact most Americans, they will likely have a disproportionate influence on the socioeconomic well-being of marginalized communities. Few researchers, however, have investigated public support for policies aimed at ameliorating climate-related disparities. Fewer still have considered how political and (critically) pre-political psychological dispositions might shape environmental justice concern (EJC) and subsequently influence policy support-both of which, I argue, could present roadblocks for effective climate communication and policy action.

Erroneous Consonance. How inaccurate beliefs about physician opinion influence COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have studied how Americans' attitudes toward health experts influence their health behaviors and policy opinions. Fewer, however, consider the potential gap between individual and expert opinion about COVID-19, and how that might shape health attitudes and behavior. This omission is notable, as discrepancies between individual and expert opinion could help explain why some Americans fail to take action to protect themselves and others from the virus.

Physician Trust in the News Media and Attitudes toward COVID-19.

Context: Previous research has established the importance of primary care physicians in communicating public health directives. The implicit assumption is that, because of their expertise, doctors provide accurate and up-to-date information to their patients independent of partisan affiliation or media trust.

Methods: The authors conducted an online survey of 625 primary care physicians and used the results to test (1) whether physician trust in media outlets is consistent with their political partisanship, and (2) whether trust in media outlets influences (a) personal concern that someone in their family will get sick, (b) perceptions about the seriousness of the pandemic as portrayed in the media, and (c) trust in federal government agencies and scientists.

The Correlates & Public Health Consequences of Prospective Vaccine Hesitancy among Individuals Who Received COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters in the U.S.

Supplemental “booster” vaccines may prove vital in combating variant waves of endemic COVID-19. Given relatively low levels of booster vaccine uptake, Americans’ willingness to receive a second booster shot is unclear. In a demographically representative survey of N = 3950 US adults (limited to a “boosted” subsample of N = 1551 who had not yet received a second booster), 49% [95% CI: 47, 51] of Americans report having received an initial booster shot, while just 34% [33, 36] report that they would be “very likely” to do so again.

Can a COVID-19 vaccine live up to Americans' expectations? A conjoint analysis of how vaccine characteristics influence vaccination intentions.

Objective: A vaccine for the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) could prove critical in establishing herd immunity. While past work has documented the prevalence and correlates of vaccine refusal, I assess how a less explored topic -- properties of vaccines themselves (e.g.