We test the effect of mask-wearing on normal social interactino. College students (N=250) were assigned to find and interact with a previously unknown student in a lecture hall, converse and then evaluate the interaction. Half were randomly assigned to wear a blue surgical mask, sunglasses, and hat; half wore no extra gear. Run in 2012 before masks carried political meaning, mask wearing had almost no effect on the ease, authenticity, or friendliness of the conversation, mood, discomfort or interestingness of the interaction. Those without masks were more likely to find people on the basis of preference for shared social activities (e.g., going to the gym in groups); those wearing masks were more likely to find people by shared preference for more individual activities (e.g., going to the gym alone). Mask-wearing did not fundamentally disable normal social interaction in this setting.

How Much Do Masks Affect Social Interaction?

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The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has strongly affected individuals and societies worldwide. In this review and meta-analysis, we investigated how aversive personality traits—i.e., relatively stable antisocial personality characteristics—related to how individuals perceived, evaluated, and responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Across 34 studies with overall 26,780 participants, we found that people with higher scores in aversive personality traits were less likely to perceive guidelines and restrictions to curb the spread of the virus as protective (p̂ = -.11), to engage in health behaviors related to COVID-19 (p̂ = -.16), and to engage in non-health related prosocial behavior related to COVID-19 (p̂ = -.14). We found no consistent relation between aversive personality and negative affect regarding the pandemic. The results thus indicate the importance of aversive personality traits in understanding individual differences with regard to COVID-19.

Aversive personality and COVID-19: A first review and meta-analysis

Many vaccine skeptics have changed their minds.

Vaccine Persuasion

The AAP strongly advocates that all policy considerations for school plans should start with the goal of keeping students safe and physically present in school.

COVID-19 Guidance for Safe Schools

Boris Johnson was reluctant to tighten Covid restrictions as cases rose last autumn because he thought people dying from it were "essentially all over 80", Dominic Cummings has claimed.

Covid: Boris Johnson resisted autumn lockdown as only over-80s dying - Dominic Cummings

People trying to order tests through the government website told that ‘no more tests can be ordered’

Lateral flow Covid tests run out on day lockdown is fully lifted

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A Bayesian Study On Social Media Language During The First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Personality traits change over time, however research on it was sparse, since previous approaches were too time-consuming and expensive. Also, the necessary methodological complexity was beyond the capabilities of classical personality researchers, which resulted in contradictory results and lack of methodological standards. In this paper, we presented a simple and cost-effective method that overcame these restrictions. We introduced a machine learning approach for daily measurements to personality research, and developed a bespoke Bayesian algorithm to analyse the observed change. This resulted in uncovering concrete points of regime-shift that overlapped with relevant exogenous events for a Japanese sample of social media users. With it, we showed that personality measures displayed significant elasticity under extreme exogenous conditions during the first wave of COVID-19 and the subsequent societal countermeasures, which can be interpreted as a temporary shift from normal expression of latent psychological traits z to their respective emergency expression ze. Concretely, we found that the group of top 25% Conscientiousness users displayed a significant change in the FFM factors Agreeableness and Extraversion. We finally compared our findings with those from similar studies in other cultures, and discussed generalisability as well as future qualitative and quantitative directions for research.

Modelling Personality Change During Extreme Exogenous Conditions

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The COVID-19 pandemic caused temporary yet significant changes in young children’s learning environments around the world. In Turkey and many other countries where young children are commonly taken care of at home, a notable pandemic-related change was the increased presence of the father at home. This study utilized this unusual situation to examine the contributions of mothers and fathers in language learning. A two-part online survey was administered to the parents of an 8- to 36- month-old, and we analyzed data from 128 families at Time 1 (Mage = 21.91) and 52 families at Time 2 (Mage = 25.09). As a proxy of the parental language input, we asked the parents to write a story about a picture as if they were telling a bedtime story to their child. The number of words used in the mother’s story, but not the father’s story, predicted the vocabulary level of children.

Parental contributions to language development during the COVID-19

10.31234/osf.io/3famu

The COVID-19 pandemic has created tremendous, and unequal, burdens on mental and physical health throughout the United States. Prior work suggests that LGBTQ+ individuals have experienced disproportionate harms due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but potential mechanisms underlying these disparities remain unclear. In a large (N = 893) sample of U.S. LGBTQ+ adults, we examined four theoretically derived risk factors as potential contributors to depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation during the summer of 2020. Stressors and disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic were common, with over 25% of participants experiencing changes in their living situation, 40% reporting interruptions in health care access, and high levels stress due to social isolation, financial concerns, and increased mental health symptoms. We found that social disconnection, disruptions in health care, financial strain, and efforts to avoid disclosing one’s sexual orientation or gender identity at home were each associated with poorer mental health, with the largest effects evident for identity disclosure avoidance. Transgender and gender diverse adults reported poorer mental health overall, but gender identity did not moderate the effects of other tested risk factors. Results highlight the importance of considering LGBTQ+ mental health in the context of minority-specific stress processes, in addition to more general social determinants of health.

LGBTQ+ mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: Testing mechanisms and moderators of risk

Carrying Equity in COVID-19 Vaccination Forward: Guidance Informed by Communities of Color

Seven months into the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in the United States, nearly 50% of the American population has been vaccinated. While this is a monumental accomplishment, there is still much work to do. In the coming months, the country will face a series of vaccination challenges including serving groups with persistently low vaccine uptake (due to, for example, low/no access, vaccine hesitancy, or a combination of factors), expanding COVID-19 vaccination to children (particularly those whose parents may be less willing to vaccinate their children than to get vaccinated themselves), and orchestrating a potential booster dose campaign (with its own hesitancy issues). As the COVID-19 vaccination campaign continues, lessons from the vaccine rollout to date can help provide direction moving forward. One challenge that deserves closer attention and more refined solutions is the campaign’s limited success at delivering vaccines to low-income persons and communities of color. During the pandemic, these populations have experienced significant physical, financial, and psychological harms at a disproportionate rate. The continued emergence and spread of new SARS-CoV-2 virus variants and the resumption of routine social, commercial, and educational activities across the country amplify the risks that COVID-19 poses to these groups. This report provides specific guidance on adapting COVID-19 vaccination efforts to achieve greater vaccine coverage in underserved populations and, through this, to develop sustainable, locally appropriate mechanisms to advance equity in health. In the first half of the report, we outline findings from local, ethnographic research conducted within Black and Hispanic/Latino communities in Alabama, California, Idaho, Maryland, and Virginia. Since January, local research teams have been assessing community infrastructure; listening to community members, public health officials, and government leaders; and coordinating engagement activities to understand how best to promote awareness of, access to, and acceptability of COVID-19 vaccines. In the second half of this report, we present the policy and practice implications of the local research. The Working Group on Equity in COVID-19 Vaccination—an advisory body of community advocates, public health experts, and social scientists—developed the recommendations, eliciting local team feedback.

False content has been published on social media regarding the microchip theory, with many conspiracy theorists saying that COVID-19 is just a coverup to track people using the vaccines.

20% of Americans believe microchips are inside COVID-19 vaccines - study

According to epidemiologists, meeting outside helps minimise infection risks but heat itself has a negligible effect on the virus

Does warm weather mean you are less likely to catch Covid?

The agency cites link to a small number of Guillain-Barré cases after vaccination but says the shot’s benefits outweigh the risk

FDA adds new warning on Johnson & Johnson vaccine related to rare autoimmune disorder

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The backfire effect is when a correction increases belief in the very misconception it is attempting to correct, and it is often used as a reason not to correct misinformation. The current study aimed to test whether correcting misinformation increases belief more than a no-correction control. Furthermore, we aimed to examine whether item-level differences in backfire rates were associated with test-retest reliability or theoretically meaningful factors. These factors included worldview-related attributes, namely perceived importance and strength of pre-correction belief, and familiarity-related attributes, namely perceived novelty and the illusory truth effect. In two nearly identical experiments, we conducted a longitudinal pre/post design with N = 388 and 532 participants. Participants rated 21 misinformation items and were assigned to a correction condition or test-retest control. We found that no items backfired more in the correction condition compared to test-retest control or initial belief ratings. Item backfire rates were strongly negatively correlated with item reliability (⍴ = -.61 / -.73) and did not correlate with worldview-related attributes. Familiarity-related attributes were significantly correlated with backfire rate, though they did not consistently account for unique variance beyond reliability. While there have been previous papers highlighting the non-replicable nature of backfire effects, the current findings provide a potential mechanism for this poor replicability. It is crucial for future research into backfire effects to use reliable measures, report the reliability of their measures, and take reliability into account in analyses. Furthermore, fact-checkers and communicators should not avoid giving corrective information due to backfire concerns.

Backfire effects after correcting misinformation are strongly associated with reliability

Anyone entering a restaurant, café, shopping centre, hospital or taking a long-distance train in France will have to show a special Covid health pass from August, Emmanuel Macron has announced, as France tightens restrictions to contain the surging Delta variant.

France mandates Covid health pass for restaurants and cafés

In the modern history of catastrophic infectious diseases in Brazil, children often suffer the most in terms of deaths and disability. When dengue epidemics emerged in Brazil in 2007 and 2008, children accounted for more than half of the fatalities. When pregnant women became infected with the Zika virus during an epidemic that began in 2015, more than 1,600 newborn Brazilian infants were born with devastating microcephaly birth defects, far more than in any other nation. Respiratory viruses continue to disproportionately affect Brazil’s children, while hookworms and other intestinal parasites stunt childhood growth and development, especially in poor rural areas.

Why Are So Many Children in Brazil Dying From Covid-19?

Scientists are asking a lot of questions about Covid-19 booster shots, but they don’t yet have many answers. Here’s what they know so far.

We’ll Probably Need Booster Shots for Covid-19. But When? And Which Ones?

Data shows increased danger for those on the frontline in the pandemic, with misinformation, scarce vaccines and fragile health systems blamed ‘They stormed the ICU and beat the doctor’: health workers under attack

Spat at, abused, attacked: healthcare staff face rising violence during Covid

Comparing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic between countries or across time is difficult because the reported numbers of cases and deaths can be strongly affected by testing capacity and reporting policy. Excess mortality, defined as the increase in all-cause mortality relative to the expected mortality, is widely considered as a more objective indicator of the COVID-19 death toll. However, there has been no global, frequently-updated repository of the all-cause mortality data across countries. To fill this gap, we have collected weekly, monthly, or quarterly all-cause mortality data from 94 countries and territories, openly available as the regularly-updated World Mortality Dataset. We used this dataset to compute the excess mortality in each country during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that in several worst-affected countries (Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Mexico) the excess mortality was above 50% of the expected annual mortality. At the same time, in several other countries (Australia, New Zealand) mortality during the pandemic was below the usual level, presumably due to social distancing measures decreasing the non-COVID infectious mortality. Furthermore, we found that while many countries have been reporting the COVID-19 deaths very accurately, some countries have been substantially underreporting their COVID-19 deaths (e.g. Nicaragua, Russia, Uzbekistan), sometimes by two orders of magnitude (Tajikistan). Our results highlight the importance of open and rapid all-cause mortality reporting for pandemic monitoring.

10.1101/2021.01.27.21250604

The World Mortality Dataset: Tracking excess mortality across countries during the COVID-19 pandemic

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Interpersonal touch and affective touch play a crucial role in social interactions and have a positive influence on mental health. The social distancing regulations related to the COVID-19 pandemic have reduced the ability to engage in interpersonal touch. This could cause touch deprivation, and it might alter the way in which affective touch is perceived. To investigate this, we conducted an online survey with 2348 participants, which contained questions regarding the COVID-19 regulations, touch deprivation and the perceived pleasantness of affective and non-affective touch. Results showed that participants reported feelings of touch deprivation. This significantly increased with the duration and severity of the COVID-19 regulations. Participants who experienced more touch deprivation rated videos of affective and non-affective touch as more pleasant. Current results provide insight in the impact of sudden and prolonged COVID-19 regulations and show that increasing the duration and severity of these regulations is associated with a higher desire for touch, which leads to increased perceived pleasantness of touch.

Out of touch: Touch deprivation and affective touch perception during the COVID-19 pandemic

As with vaccines and drugs, the pandemic has shown how access to this life-saving resource is deeply unequal Dr Charlotte Summers is a lecturer in intensive care medicine at the University of Cambridge

Oxygen shortages are killing thousands. Why aren’t we doing more about this?

Last month, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said vaccinated people could resume gathering indoors unmasked, many saw it as the most hopeful sign so far of the nation’s reopening.But Pamela Addison felt blindsided. She got on a Zoom call with other women whose husbands had died of covid-19. To many, it felt too soon to stop wearing masks. And the CDC announcement felt like a punch in the stomach.Support our journalism. Subscribe today.arrow-right“I think it makes our grief deeper,” said Addison, 37, a teacher in Waldwick, N.J. Her 44-year-old husband Martin, a speech pathologist at a hospital, died of the coronavirus in April 2020, leaving behind two children, who are now 3 and 1. “As people move forward who haven’t been impacted, I kind of feel like they forget and don’t care about the people whose lives were. You kind of don’t feel cared about.”

For those who lost loved ones to covid, there is no return to normal

10.1038/s41591-021-01410-w

The effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination in preventing new severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections in the general community is still unclear. Here, we used the Office for National Statistics COVID-19 Infection Survey—a large community-based survey of individuals living in randomly selected private households across the United Kingdom—to assess the effectiveness of the BNT162b2 (Pfizer–BioNTech) and ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (Oxford–AstraZeneca; ChAdOx1) vaccines against any new SARS-CoV-2 PCR-positive tests, split according to self-reported symptoms, cycle threshold value (<30 versus ≥30; as a surrogate for viral load) and gene positivity pattern (compatible with B.1.1.7 or not). Using 1,945,071 real-time PCR results from nose and throat swabs taken from 383,812 participants between 1 December 2020 and 8 May 2021, we found that vaccination with the ChAdOx1 or BNT162b2 vaccines already reduced SARS-CoV-2 infections ≥21 d after the first dose (61% (95% confidence interval (CI) = 54–68%) versus 66% (95% CI = 60–71%), respectively), with greater reductions observed after a second dose (79% (95% CI = 65–88%) versus 80% (95% CI = 73–85%), respectively). The largest reductions were observed for symptomatic infections and/or infections with a higher viral burden. Overall, COVID-19 vaccination reduced the number of new SARS-CoV-2 infections, with the largest benefit received after two vaccinations and against symptomatic and high viral burden infections, and with no evidence of a difference between the BNT162b2 and ChAdOx1 vaccines. Download PDF

Impact of vaccination on new SARS-CoV-2 infections in the United Kingdom

Meet the influencers making millions by dealing doubt about coronavirus vaccines.

Spreading Vaccine Fears, And Cashing In

Op-Ed: How Not to Message the Public on COVID Vaccines — A "cringe-inducing" public service announcement with doctors and nurses

Detecting the coronavirus in samples from treatment plants could give early warning of outbreaks and new variants.

How waste water is helping South Africa fight COVID-19

More ways of supporting people to self-isolate in areas with higher coronavirus infection rates are to be piloted in nine parts of England.

Covid: Parts of England to trial self-isolation support

Poll on vaccine hesitancy demonstrates the extraordinary predicament researchers face in transmitting risk information during a pandemic.

‘It’s a minefield’: COVID vaccine safety poses unique communication challenge

Getting everyone vaccinated in the United States has become much harder now that demand for the Covid-19 vaccine is flagging. America’s vaccination strategy needs to change to address this, and it starts with understanding the specific reasons people have not been vaccinated yet. The conventional approach to understanding whether someone will get vaccinated is asking people how likely they are to get the vaccine and then building a demographic profile based on their answers: Black, white, Latinx, Republican, Democrat. But this process isn’t enough: Just knowing that Republicans are less likely to get vaccinated doesn’t tell us how to get them vaccinated. It’s more important to understand why people are still holding out, where those people live and how to reach them.

Meet the Four Kinds of People Holding Us Back From Full Vaccination

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused more than 160 million infections and more than 3 million deaths worldwide. While effective vaccines are currently being deployed, the adaptive immune determinants which promote viral clearance and confer protection remain poorly defined. Using mouse models of SARS-CoV-2, we demonstrate that both humoral and cellular adaptive immunity contributes to viral clearance in the setting of primary infection. Furthermore, we find that either convalescent mice, or mice that receive mRNA vaccination are protected from both homologous infection and infection with a variant of concern, B.1.351. Additionally, we find this protection to be largely mediated by antibody response and not cellular immunity. These results highlight the in vivo protective capacity of antibodies generated to both vaccine and natural infection.

10.1101/2021.05.19.444825

Adaptive immune determinants of viral clearance and protection in mouse models of SARS-CoV-2

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Disease-causing parasites and pathogens play a pivotal role in intergroup behavior. Previous studies have suggested that the selection pressure posed by pathogen threat has resulted in in-group assortative sociality, including xenophobia and in-group favoritism. While the current literature has collated numerous studies on the former, strikingly, there has not been much research on the relationship between pathogen threat and in-group cooperation. Drawing upon prior studies on the function of the behavioral immune system (BIS), we argued that the BIS might facilitate cooperation with in-group members as a reactive behavioral immune response to pathogen threat. More specifically, we held that individuals might utilize cooperative behavior to ensure that they can receive social support when they have contracted an infectious disease. We reviewed existing findings pertaining to the potential role of the BIS in in-group cooperation and discussed directions for future studies.

Pathogen Threat and In-Group Cooperation

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Choice context influences decision processes, and is one of the primary determinants of what people choose. This insight has been used by academics and practitioners to study decision biases and design behavioral interventions to influence and improve choices. In this paper we analyze the effects of context-based behavioral interventions on the computational mechanisms underlying decision making. We collect data from two very large laboratory studies involving nineteen prominent behavioral interventions, and model the influence of each intervention using a leading computational model of choice in psychology and neuroscience. This allows us to parametrize the biases induced by each intervention, interpret these biases in terms of underlying decision mechanisms and their properties, quantify similarities between interventions, and predict how different interventions alter key choice outcomes. In doing so, we offer researchers and practitioners a theoretically principled approach to understanding and manipulating choice context in decision making.

Computational mechanisms for context-based behavioral interventions: A large-scale analysis

India’s huge wave of Covid-19 infections has hit the international shipping industry, which relies on the country for seafarers, as crews come down with the disease and ports deny entry to vessels.Ports including Singapore and Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates have barred ships from changing crew members who have recently travelled from India, notices from maritime authorities show. Zhoushan in China has banned the entry of ships or crew that have visited India or Bangladesh in the past three months, according to Wilhelmsen Ship Management, a crew provider.Industry executives also said that crews coming from India were testing positive for Covid-19 on ships, despite quarantining and testing negative before boarding.

India’s Covid surge rocks global shipping industry

10.1016/j.bbi.2021.03.008

Vaccine hesitancy could undermine efforts to control COVID-19. We investigated the prevalence of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in the UK and identified vaccine hesitant subgroups. The ‘Understanding Society’ COVID-19 survey asked participants (n = 12,035) their likelihood of vaccine uptake and reason for hesitancy. Cross-sectional analysis assessed vaccine hesitancy prevalence and logistic regression calculated odds ratios. Overall vaccine hesitancy was low (18% unlikely/very unlikely). Vaccine hesitancy was higher in women (21.0% vs 14.7%), younger age groups (26.5% in 16–24 year olds vs 4.5% in 75 + ) and those with lower education levels (18.6% no qualifications vs 13.2% degree qualified). Vaccine hesitancy was high in Black (71.8%) and Pakistani/Bangladeshi (42.3%) ethnic groups. Odds ratios for vaccine hesitancy were 13.42 (95% CI:6.86, 26.24) in Black and 2.54 (95% CI:1.19, 5.44) in Pakistani/Bangladeshi groups (compared to White British/Irish) and 3.54 (95% CI:2.06, 6.09) for people with no qualifications versus degree. Urgent action to address hesitancy is needed for some but not all ethnic minority groups.

Predictors of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in the UK household longitudinal study

There is huge variation in the percentage of frontline NHS healthcare staff who have been vaccinated against Covid in England.More than 98% in the North East and South West have had a first dose - but only 79% in London, leaving around 35,000 staff unvaccinated there.Ministers are considering whether to make the jab mandatory for NHS staff.Health and social care workers across the UK were one of the first groups to be offered a vaccine. In England, NHS data suggests 93% of eligible frontline staff have been vaccinated - equivalent to one million doses. But, nearly three months after the vaccination programme began, up to 80,000 frontline staff have still not taken up the offer.

Covid-19: Vaccinated NHS staff numbers vary across England

10.1016/S1473-3099(21)00225-5

As of early April, 2021, more than 2·8 million individuals have died globally from COVID-19. However, tens of millions of patients have survived COVID-19 and returned to everyday life. Increasing evidence has shown that a considerable proportion of patients did not recover fully and had lasting sequelae, described by various terms without consensus, including long COVID, post-COVID condition or syndrome, postacute (or late) sequelae of COVID-19, and post-acute COVID syndrome.1Lerner AM Robinson DA Yang L et al.Toward understanding COVID-19 recovery: National Institutes of Health workshop on postacute COVID-19.Ann Intern Med. 2021; (published online March 30.)https://doi.org/10.7326/M21-1043Crossref PubMed Google Scholar,  2Nalbandian A Sehgal K Gupta A et al.Post-acute COVID-19 syndrome.Nat Med. 2021; 27: 601-615Crossref PubMed Scopus (1) Google Scholar Studies have mainly focused on patients with COVID-19 after hospital admission.3Huang C Huang L Wang Y et al.6-month consequences of COVID-19 in patients discharged from hospital: a cohort study.Lancet. 2021; 397: 220-232Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (51) Google Scholar,  4Morin L Savale L Pham T et al.Four-month clinical status of a cohort of patients after hospitalization for COVID-19.JAMA. 2021; (published online March 17.)https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2021.3331PubMed Google Scholar One study with a small sample size and without a control group of people without COVID-19 described the long-term outcomes of patients with COVID-19 who did not require hospital admission.5Stavem K Ghanima W Olsen MK Gilboe HM Einvik G Persistent symptoms 1·5–6 months after COVID-19 in non-hospitalised subjects: a population-based cohort study.Thorax. 2020; 76: 405-407Crossref Scopus (8) Google Scholar

Post-acute conditions of patients with COVID-19 not requiring hospital admission

A form of the coronavirus variant first identified in India, which is now spreading in the UK, appears to be passed on at least as easily as the “Kent variant” that now dominates UK infections. The variant, called B.1.617.2, was designated a “variant of concern” on 7 May by health authorities in England. B.1.617.2 is one of three sub-lineages of B.1.617, the variant that has become common in India and which some have considered, but not proven, to be one potential factor behind the crisis India has been facing. On 10 May, the World Health Organization designated B.1.617 as a variant of concern. Advertisement googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('mpu-mid-article'); }); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('video-mid-article'); }); Public Health England (PHE) has moderate confidence that the B.1.617.2 variant is on a par for transmissibility with B.1.1.7, which originated in the UK, said Sharon Peacock at the University of Cambridge at a press briefing today. The view is based on the variant’s mutations and its ability to circulate in the UK alongside the Kent variant. However, there is still much we don’t know about the Indian variants.

Indian coronavirus variant in the UK seems to be more transmissible

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OBJECTIVE: To explore public attitudes to COVID-19 vaccines in the UK, focused on intentions and decisions around taking vaccines, views on ‘vaccine passports’, and experiences and perspectives on post-vaccination behaviour. DESIGN: Qualitative study consisting of 6 online focus groups conducted between 15th March – 22nd April 2021. SETTING: Online video conferencing PARTICIPANTS: 29 adult UK-based participants RESULTS: Three main groups regarding participants’ decision or intention to receive a COVID-19 vaccine were identified: (1) Accepters, (2) Delayers and (3) Refusers. Two reasons for vaccine delay were identified: delay due to a perceived need more information and delay until vaccine was “required” in the future. Three main facilitators (Vaccination as a social norm; Vaccination as a necessity; Trust in science) and six barriers (Preference for “natural immunity”; Concerns over possible side effects; Distrust in government; Perceived lack of information; Conspiracy theories; “Covid echo chambers”) to vaccine uptake were identified. For some delayers, 'vaccine passports' were perceived to be a reason why they would get vaccinated in the future. However, vaccine passports were controversial, and were framed in four main ways: as “a necessary evil”; as “Orwellian”; as a “human rights problem”; and as a source of confidence”. Participants generally felt that receiving a vaccine was not changing the extent to which people were adhering to COVID-19 measures. CONCLUSIONS: Overall positive sentiment around vaccines is high. However, there remains a number of potential barriers which might be leading to vaccine delay in some. ‘Vaccine delay’ might be a more useful and precise construct than vaccine hesitancy in explaining why some may initially ignore or be uncertain about vaccination invitations. Vaccine passports may increase or ‘nudge’ uptake in some delayers but may be unpopular in others. Earlier concerns that vaccination might reduce adherence to social distancing measures are not borne out in our data, with most people reporting adherence and caution.

Public attitudes to COVID-19 vaccines: A qualitative study

A confusing and unusually nasty fight broke out this week over the safety of a Russian COVID-19 vaccine known as Sputnik V after a Brazilian health agency declined on Monday to authorize its import because of quality and safety concerns. The stakes escalated yesterday when the Twitter account officially associated with the vaccine said “Sputnik V is undertaking a legal defamation proceeding” against Brazil’s regulators. In an online press conference several hours later, the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency (Anvisa) defended its decision, maintaining that documentation from some of the Russian facilities making Sputnik V shows that one of its two doses contains adenoviruses capable of replication, a potential danger to vaccine recipients. The vaccine uses two different adenoviruses, which cause the common cold, to deliver the gene for the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVD-19. Both are supposed to be stripped of a key gene that allows them to replicate.

Is Russia’s COVID-19 vaccine safe? Brazil’s veto of Sputnik V sparks lawsuit threat and confusion

There are a lot of ways Dr. Kent Bream would describe the lines of people waiting, sometimes for hours, for COVID-19 vaccines at his community health clinic in West Philadelphia. Eager. Impatient. Frustrated, even. But "hesitant" doesn't come to mind. As soon as the city started sending him doses, he says, demand was never an issue. In fact, Bream's clinic — which is located in a predominantly Black neighborhood — had more vaccines than it had staff to administer them. "I said, send me vaccine and I will show you that there is not the level of vaccine hesitancy you think there is," recalls the medical director of Sayre Health Center. Despite the high demand, the latest data show that 23% of vaccines are going to Black residents. Compare that to Philadelphia's total population, which is more than 40% Black. Vaccination rates for Black and Latino people in the city are still half what they are for whites.

Why Black And Latino People Still Lag On COVID Vaccines — And How To Fix It

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We investigated laypersons’ agreement with technical claims about the spread of the Sars-CoV-2 virus and with claims about the risk from COVID-19 in the general public in Germany (N = 1,575) and compared these with the evaluations of scientific experts (N = 128). Using Latent Class Analysis, we distinguished four segments in the general public. Two groups (mainstream and cautious, 73%) are generally consistent with scientific experts in their evaluations. Two groups (doubters and deniers, 27%) differ distinctively from expert evaluations and tend to believe in conspiracies about COVID-19. Deniers (8%) are characterized by low risk assessments, anti-elitist sentiments and low compliance with containment measures. Doubters (19%) are characterized by general uncertainty in the distinction between true and false claims and by low scientific literacy in terms of cognitive ability and style. Our research indicates that conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19 cannot be linked to a single and distinct motivational structure.

Scientific Trust, Risk Assessment, and Conspiracy Beliefs about COVID-19 - Four Patterns of Consensus and Disagreement between Scientific Experts and the German Public

Two studies showed the vaccine to be more than 95 percent effective at protecting against severe disease or death from the variants first identified in South Africa and the U.K.