Hésitations Vaccinales: Observatoire HESIVAXs

🚨 A new peer-reviewed study from the Office of Health Economics shows that adult vaccination programmes for influenza, pneumococcal disease, RSV, and herpes zoster generate substantial societal value, with benefit–cost ratios ranging from 5x to 19x across ten high- and middle-income countries.

Key findings include:
💉 Significant returns on investment driven by mortality reduction and broader societal benefits.
💉 High value across established and emerging adult immunization programmes.
💉 Positive net societal value in 95% of analysed scenarios, reinforcing the case for sustained policy and funding support.

🔗 Read more here:
https://lnkd.in/e8Da2-KA

Authors: Sulayman Chowdhury, Simon Brassel, Hania E., Eleanor Bell, Margherita N. and Prof. Lotte Steuten, PhD

#ImmunizationEconomics #AdultVaccination #HealthEconomics #VaccineValue #PublicHealth #SocietalImpact #LifeCourseImmunization
 

🚨 New reserach 🚨 Can innovative financing models improve adult vaccination uptake?

Evidence from a randomized controlled trial in China shows that a pay-it-forward approach can significantly increase pneumococcal vaccine uptake among older adults, while also improving cost-effectiveness and vaccine confidence.

Key findings include:
💉Pneumococcal vaccination uptake increased from 13.5% to 70.9% under the pay-it-forward model
💉Influenza vaccine uptake also increased, despite no subsidy, suggesting spillover effects
💉Higher confidence in vaccine safety, importance, and effectiveness
💉Lower economic cost per person vaccinated for providers, compared to standard self-paid care

🔗 Read more here: https://lnkd.in/ecUe23hJ

Authors John Oller University of New Mexico Daniel Broudy Okinawa Christian University Nicolas Hulscher McCullough Foundation DOI: https://doi.org/10.56098/vse7qq65 Keywords: adverse events, autism, auto-immunity, ASHD, brain dysfunction, chronic healthconditions, COVID-19 vaccination, epilepsy,...

👩🏻‍🔬🧬🎨ArtScience article in Nature journal - my Sunday afternoon coffee read!

The interplay between art and science has always felt completely natural to me as both tap into creativity and curiosity. Art has a unique power to communicate science in ways that resonate emotionally and intellectually, while science continually inspires new artistic forms, materials, and ideas.

I grew up immersed in this mutually catalytic creativity thanks to my father, Prof. Geoffrey Ozin (grandfather of Nanochemistry), whose scientific artworks have appeared on numerous journal covers - Nature included - and through his long-standing collaboration with renowned ArtScience pioneer Todd Siler. Their shared work beautifully demonstrates how imagination and scientific inquiry can amplify one another.
Explore their collaborative ArtNano Innovations gallery here: https://lnkd.in/evJaRiTa

Today, I carry this same energy into my role as a Project Officer at the European Research Executive Agency (REA) , where I support citizen‑engagement initiatives that blend creativity, science, and societal impact.

This year, I’m especially excited to discover the selected third‑party activities funded under the #MissionSoil #HorizonEU projects SoilTribes and SOILSCAPE PROJECT . Both projects are dedicated to raising soil literacy, strengthening public understanding of soil health, and empowering communities to take action.

Art, science, and citizen engagement- whether by strengthening trust in scientific knowledge, as this article suggests, or by tapping into a deeper human instinct to care about what we emotionally connect with through artistic intervention - have a remarkable power when they converge. When these worlds meet, transformation happens. Looking forward to seeing what grows next. 🌱

📱 “Saint Google, now we have information!”

Our study with pregnant women in Mexico City and Toluca reveals that women frequently turn to Google, social media, and apps for health info. These digital channels can expose people to both helpful guidance and harmful misinformation. To build vaccine confidence, we must leverage the benefits of digital channels for accessibility, while inoculating people against false information with clear, accurate guidance.

#DigitalHealth #VaccineMisinformation #HealthTech #SocialMedia #TrustOnline

🔗 https://lnkd.in/dSMHK9Yh

Highly informative study on seasonal vaccine uptake and uptake hesitancy in #Alberta by Michelle Maroto, Andrea DeKeseredy, and Amy Kaler

Trust in Albertan government predicts reduced uptake.
Trust in the Government of #Canada predicts increased uptake (see Figure below).

Reduced uptake hinges on an individualistic social outlook, concerns of vaccine development processes, lack of vaccine necessity (e.g. COVID is just a flu), and logistical roadblocks (e.g. takes 40 minutes to get a vaccine)

Increased uptake is buoyed by trust in scientists, health agencies, and scientific processes. Those getting vaccines view getting vaccines as promoting collective health in commmunities.

Importantly:
1) Trust in government is not static, monolithic
2) Government messaging matters!

"We show that trust varies across institutions and individuals tend to take on the messages promoted by the government institutions they most trust"

Full study: https://lnkd.in/eziVBYSp

Reflecting Back: The Pitt Is Back and We Can’t Keep Calm!
With the new season of The Pitt here, we can’t help but reflect on one episode from last season. The Pitt Season 1 Episode 15, wasn’t just great TV, it was a stark reminder of how the diseases we once relegated to history books are quietly creeping back into our hospitals and communities.

In the episode, a young boy with measles arrives in the ER, a condition most U.S. clinicians haven’t seen firsthand in years. His illness, fueled not by chance but by choice (a refusal of vaccination), underscores a chilling reality: measles is not entertainment…. it’s re-emerging!

Why does this matter?

The Journal of Hospital Medicine editorial “Preparing for the unthinkable: The resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases” https://lnkd.in/e6Y7Fdzp reminds us that hospitalists and frontline clinicians are increasingly being asked to recognize, manage, and contain illnesses many of us were never trained to expect. This resurgence isn’t abstract, it is shaped by declining vaccination rates, misinformation, and fragile public trust.

What The Pitt captures so well is the cognitive dissonance of modern medicine: practicing in a technologically advanced healthcare system while confronting diseases we assumed were behind us. The episode becomes less about measles itself and more about preparedness: clinical, ethical, and societal.

For hospitalists, this is a moment of reckoning. Are we doing our due diligence to train clinicians to recognize diseases they may never have seen? Are our systems ready for rapid identification, isolation, and public health coordination when it comes to these diseases? And are we comfortable having the harder conversations, not just with patients, but with communities, about prevention, responsibility, and collective risk?

Need guidance on how to improve vaccine confidence, read more on “Building vaccine confidence through empathy and evidence-based communication”, https://lnkd.in/ef-ADCZg

We would love your thoughts:

What were your favorite things about Season 1 Episode 15 of The Pitt?

How prepared do you feel, clinically and operationally, to manage vaccine-preventable diseases you were never trained to expect?

What role should hospitalists play beyond the bedside in rebuilding trust around vaccination and prevention?

#JHMWatchParty #JHM #SHM #HospitalMedicine #VaccinesWork #PublicHealth #ThePitt

What people say about vaccination — and what they actually do later — are not always the same thing.

That’s why I loved this recent paper from The Lancet. The authors followed 1.1 million people and tracked vaccine attitudes alongside real vaccination behaviour over time.

Two thirds of people who initially said they were hesitant eventually got vaccinated. They were not anti-science. They were uncertain. They needed more information, and they needed time. As evidence accumulated and uncertainty shrank, many (most) changed their mind.

From a risk communication perspective, this matters because it challenges how hesitancy is often treated in practice. Uncertainty is not the same as rejection. For many people, hesitancy reflects how hard it is to make decisions when risks are new, information is incomplete, and the stakes feel personal.

The paper also draws an important distinction. Not all hesitancy is the same. When it was rooted in lower trust, lower perception of personal risk, or general anti-vaccine sentiment, people were far more resistant. Time and additional information helped much less there.

In practical terms, this suggests that clearer explanations and more data can genuinely help some people move — but not everyone. For a large group, reducing uncertainty was enough. For others, the barrier wasn’t information, but trust.

It leaves me thinking about how often we collapse very different situations into a single label, and then expect one communication approach to work for all of them. And about how much of risk communication depends not on what we say in a crisis, but on what kind of trust already exists when uncertainty hits.

Truth with a Twist: The Rhetoric of Persuasion in Professional vs. Community-Authored Fact-Checks (arXiv):

https://lnkd.in/dZaF25dg

Glimpse: This study offers the first extensive comparison of the persuasive strategies employed in professionally produced versus crowdsourced debunks. It assesses the frequency and kinds of persuasive tactics in various fact-checking ecosystems by utilizing large datasets from Community Notes, EUvsDisinfo, and the Database of Known Fakes. The results demonstrate no greater average usage of persuasion techniques than professional fact-checks, challenging the notion that crowd-written debunks depend more heavily on subjective or persuasive language. Simultaneously, the analysis finds systemic rhetorical disparities associated with topical attention and institutional standards. It also shows that crowd assessors successfully penalize the employment of rhetorically problematic approaches, even if more persuasive remarks tend to obtain slightly higher helpfulness ratings.

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Free articles and analyses on soft counter-extremism, against online hate, and on the theory of mis-/disinformation (usually third-party content). Two-week reviews available via the following three Policyinstitute.net websites: 
• counter-terrorism.org
• preventhate.org
• strategism.org

The most recent LinkedIn posts on the above subjects, with glimpses, can be accessed via: 
• https://lnkd.in/eBarZAew

The views expressed in this post is that of the author(s) of the source content and do not necessarily represent those of Policyinstitute.net and its staff. While we carefully produce the glimpses to the articles, documents, or recordings that we hyperlink, we are not responsible for textual changes nor for imponderable parts of the original items. 

#policyinstitutenet #preventradicalization #preventextremism #counterextremism #preventhate #disinformation #misinformation

Our new paper looks at vaccine mandates and their alternatives, from a psychological science perspective. Thanks to Philipp Schmid for leading the process.

Vaccination is widely considered to be the pre-eminent public health achievement of modern history, but declining coverage resulting from vaccine hesitancy and from interruptions in immunization campaigns in geopolitically unstable regions threatens progress against vaccine-preventable diseases. The global burden of vaccine-preventable neurological diseases is substantial, resulting in acute and chronic complications as well as high case fatality rates. In recent years, outbreaks of dengue, poliomyelitis, measles, pertussis, meningococcal disease and Japanese encephalitis virus have been linked to lack of access to vaccines, overwhelmed health-care systems, misinformation and disinformation regarding vaccine safety, and gaps in vaccination coverage caused by environmental factors and geopolitical conflicts. Coordinated global strategies, including addressing barriers to vaccination and ensuring equitable access; targeted health education about vaccine benefits and risks; integration with other public services; and advances in next-generation vaccine technologies to tackle antimicrobial resistance and non-vaccine serotype replacement, will be crucial to prevent a resurgence of vaccine-preventable neurological diseases, especially in vulnerable populations, to maintain global health security. We are witnessing a worldwide resurgence in vaccine-preventable neurological diseases owing to gaps in vaccination coverage caused by multiple factors, including vaccine hesitancy and geopolitical conflicts. This Review highlights ongoing challenges to controlling vaccine-preventable neurological diseases such as measles, poliomyelitis, Japanese encephalitis and meningitis and considers how collaborative global strategies can facilitate effective immunization policies.

#VAXVOICE @vaxvoice.org
" Highlights:
• Dengue is the world's fastest growing vector-borne disease with an expanding geographical range.
• Dengue vaccines are not licensed in many countries with a high incidence in Africa and South Asia.
• Where licensing is available elsewhere, dengue vaccines are not included in the national immunisation programme.
• Economic and geopolitical systemic factors affect all stages of dengue vaccine development.
• Issues with vaccine hesitancy may further hamper dengue vaccine rollout if not strategically addressed."
https://lnkd.in/d5zwDFNq
Rebecca C. Christofferson
Eduardo Eugênio Bittencourt de Gomensoro
Clemens Müller

Can multi-component, multi-channel nudges increase influenza vaccination during primary care visits?

TL;DR: A multi-component nudge intervention significantly increased influenza vaccine completion among adults aged 50+ during primary care visits. Adding bidirectional text messaging for high-risk patients did not further improve uptake.

-------------------

In a pragmatic randomized controlled trial of 80,039 patients in 47 clinics, University of Pennsylvania & University of Washington collaborators and I evaluated a multi-component nudge intervention—including patient reminders, clinician-facing defaults, and peer comparison—and found that:

* Patients in intervention clinics were more likely to receive an influenza vaccine during their visit than those in usual care (31.4% vs 26.4%; adjusted OR 1.28; 97.5% CI 1.13–1.45)

* The intervention increased vaccination by 5.1 percentage points compared with usual care (97.5% CI 2.6%–7.5%)

* Among patients at high risk for non-completion, bidirectional text messaging did not improve vaccination compared with standard text reminders (OR 1.00; 97.5% CI 0.98–1.02)

Article Link: https://lnkd.in/g4WfhDmE

Yet another scientific study, i.e., peer-reviewed and published in a credible journal, showing the safety of the COVID vaccines.

Antivaxxers have argued the excess deaths to be due to the COVID vaccination. However, in response to the mounting evidence that there's zero evidence for their bogus claims, they're now changing the narrative and warn about the "long term" effects of the vaccines, again without providing any evidence. I wonder what they will turn to when we eventually get data on that and (hopefully) find no such risks either.

https://lnkd.in/gyPqqFFn

Our latest study in JAMA finds county-level vaccine exemptions to childhood vaccine requirements are rising across the United States, lowering vaccination coverage and increasing outbreak risk. We identify geographic hotspots with high vaccine exemption rates and elevated susceptibility to vaccine-preventable diseases.

Great collaboration with NBC News colleagues and our Stanford team.

Study link: https://lnkd.in/guQpnSbn

Recent media mentions:
CNN: https://lnkd.in/gAH97eaP
NBC: https://lnkd.in/guxHqipB
NPR: https://lnkd.in/gXRrD9XD

🚨New BCFG paper alert 🚨

One size may not fit all for behavioral interventions.

Led by @ilanabrody, our research shows that people’s past behavior helps predict which interventions are most effective at changing current behavior.

Read more: https://bit.ly/4pCsa2Q

Adult #immunization remains an underexplored and underfunded area, despite its significant potential to reduce disease burden, protect productivity, and strengthen health system resilience.

A cost–benefit study from the Office of Health Economics provides valuable evidence on the societal and economic impact of adult immunization programs for major infectious diseases—including influenza, pneumococcal disease, herpes zoster, and respiratory syncytial virus. These insights offer an important foundation to guide smart policy and investment decisions.

Adult vaccination is more than a health intervention. It is a strategic, long‑term investment in people, health systems, and economies.

The study is now available in Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics (open access):

➡️https://lnkd.in/eh9dER4e

#VaccinesForLife