Table 1 Overview of resources: Descriptions of resources in the text
Resource | Evidence base |
|---|---|
WHO guidance for tailoring immunisation programmes (TIP) | |
The resource is grounded in evidence which based on experiences in 12 countries within and outside the European region from 2013 to 2019. An external committee of six global experts conducted a review in 2016 informed by country assessments, a review of national and regional documents, and an online regional survey. Various publications document the successful application of TIP42,43,44,45. | |
COVID-19 vaccination communication handbook | |
The handbook was created by a team of academics from diverse disciplines, drawing on decades of research in their respective fields. It summarises and highlights the relevant facts and recommendations regarding vaccine communication in the context of COVID-19. The handbook relies on guides and documents from health organisations, public bodies and researchers, as well as published scientific research on vaccine hesitancy, science communication and debunking misinformation. The handbook provides detailed references to evidence for each of the recommendations it makes. | |
Motivational-interviewing training materials | |
Studies in Canada, including multicentre randomised controlled trials47,49,56, have proven the effectiveness of the motivational-interviewing approach50. Both vaccine hesitancy and uptake were positively affected by these interventions. Since 2018, the PromoVac strategy, an educational intervention based on the motivational-interviewing approach, has been successfully implemented as a new practice of care in maternity wards across the province of Quebec through the Entretien Motivationnel en Maternité pour l’Immunisation des Enfants (EMMIE) programme. | |
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/hcp/engaging-patients.html | |
https://psychwire.com/motivational-interviewing/addressing-vaccine-hesitancy | |
Educational resources for health-care personnel to help address vaccine misconceptions | |
The resource is based on a systematic literature review of 152 scientific articles, a thematic analysis of 2066 anti-vaccination arguments, which identified 11 underlying attitude roots (i.e. psychological constructs underlying people’s deeply-held beliefs) and more than 60 anti-vaccination “memes” that represent common instantiations of those roots. The resource guides the user through rebuttals of those memes that are cognisant of the underlying attitude root and provide affirmation of the patient’s deeply-held beliefs while also correcting a particular meme. | |
Handbook on how to debunk misinformation | |
https://skepticalscience.com/debunking-handbook-2020-downloads-translations.html | The Debunking-Handbook 202057 is based on an expert review of 22 experts whose research focuses on countering misinformation (selection process of experts: https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/DB2020paper.pdf). Studies have shown that debunking or prebunking misinformation by using a fact-sandwich (Table 2)35 or other optimised forms of refutation messages58 successfully reduces the impact of misinformation, at least in the short term. Moreover, meta-analyses on debunking show that correcting misinformation in social media posts works59,60. |
How to respond to vocal vaccine deniers in public | |
The central recommendations of the WHO guidance documents on how to rebut misinformation were tested in nine experimental studies across two peer-reviewed research articles, showing that rebutting misinformation either by uncovering the rhetorical techniques of science denialism or by stating the scientific facts (or both) reduces the negative effects of the vaccine denier34,40. | |
