Infodemics and Vaccine Confidence: Protocol for Social Listening and Insight Generation to Inform Action.

Background: In the fall of 2020, the COVID-19 infodemic began to affect public confidence in and demand for COVID-19 vaccines in the United States. While polls indicated what consumers felt regarding COVID-19 vaccines, they did not provide an understanding of why they felt that way or the social and informational influences that factored into vaccine confidence and uptake. It was essential for us to better understand how information ecosystems were affecting the confidence in and demand for COVID-19 vaccines in the United States.

What North American retail food environment indices miss in Guatemala: Cultural considerations for the study of place and health.

We evaluated the cross-context validity and equivalence of the US- and Canada-originated Retail Food Environment Index (RFEI) and modified RFEI (mRFEI) against a retail food environment dataset from the indigenous-majority city of Quetzaltenango (Xela), Guatemala. The RFEI/mRFEI failed to identify 77% of retailers and misclassified the healthiness of 42% of the remaining retailers in Xela, inaccurately labeling the city a food swamp. The RFEI/mRFEI are not currently suitable for mapping retail food environments in places like Quetzaltenango.