Vaccine Misinformation Management Field Guide

"Now, let's all get to work to ensure that online vaccination conversations are filled with clear information and answers to people's questions, not dangerous disinformation." - Angus Thomson

People are vulnerable to misinformation, especially in times of uncertainty, due to a complex mix of cognitive, social, and algorithmic biases. Public uncertainty in the COVID-19 pandemic is being exacerbated by an "infodemic", a confusing mix of information and misinformation that threatens successful implementation of COVID-19 vaccination programmes. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), First Draft, Yale Institute for Global Health, and PGP (The Public Good Projects) collaborated to create this guide to help practitioners working in immunisation programmes develop evidence-based approaches, informed by active social listening, to rapidly counter vaccine misinformation and build demand for vaccination. A recording of a webinar, "Misinformation: A Strategic Approach", related to the guide is also available, below.

Main contents of the guide include:

Part I: Vaccination in the Information Age

• Vaccine hesitancy
• Infodemics, misinformation and disinformation
• Why are people susceptible to misinformation?
• Misinformation is sticky
• 3 reasons why people create vaccine disinformation
• Don't be distracted by disinformation
• A strategic approach to misinformation management

Part 2: Misinformation Management: A Field Guide

Preparation phase
• Build team & strategy
• Information ecosystem assessment
1. Listen phase
   • Build social listening system
     • Monitoring tools
     • Search queries
   • Social listening
   • Rumour log
2. Understand phase
   • Assess misinformation
   • Actionable insights
3. Engage phase
   • Shape the agenda
   • Prevention
     • Simple warnings
     • Media and health literacy
     • Inoculation (prebunking)
     • Inoculating at scale
4. Debunking
5. Trustworthy communicators
6. Quantify impact

Conclusion

Appendices

• Appendix 1: Case studies
  • Case study I: Polio in Pakistan: fake videos fuel mistrust
  • Case study II: Dengue in the Philippines: How vaccine controversy spreads
  • Case study III: HPV [human papillomavirus] in Malawi: crisis preparedness ahead of vaccine rollout
• Appendix 2: Setting up basic social listening systems
• Appendix 3: 5 tips to make your content stickier than disinformation
• Appendix 4: Examples of innoculating messages
• Appendix 5: Example performance metrics and outcome metrics
• Appendix 6: Interventions to build immunity to misinformation

Also offered (click on the video below to watch it in English; click on the URL to watch it in English or French) is a video recording of an October 29 2020 webinar, "Misinformation: A Strategic Approach", hosted by the Sabin Vaccine Institute, UNICEF, and the Boost Community to discuss strategies for immunisation professionals to manage vaccination misinformation. For example, representatives from the UNICEF Pakistan Country Office discussed their work in UNICEF's risk communication and community engagement (RCCE) programme, which uses social and behavioural data around COVID-19 to refine its intervention, messages, and community engagement. The evidence has been used to flag key issues and share recommendations with policymakers, as well as shape sectoral and RCCE interventions. As they report, during the Typhoid Conjugate Vaccine introduction in Sindh province in 2019, social listening helped in addressing public concerns around vaccine-related misinformation through digital media. Under a partnership with Facebook (Insights for Impact), data from different social listening tools are being used to run a customised digital media campaign that aims to provide accurate information to the public on routine immunisation for children.