How does social behavior lead to clusters of vaccine hesitancy?

How does social behavior lead to clusters of vaccine hesitancy?
Researchers assess how social behavior leads to clusters of vaccine hesitancy. Credit: cromaconceptovisual, Pixabay (CC0, creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)

Geographical pockets of vaccination behavior can be attributed to both pre-existing sociodemographic clusters as well as the way vaccine hesitancy spreads through neighboring societies, according to a new study publishing October 13 in the open-access journalPLOS Computational Biologyby Lucila Alvarez-Zuzek of Georgetown University, U.S., and colleagues.

In recent decades,has gained ground, threatening the maintenance of herd immunity for various pathogens. The geographic clustering of vaccine hesitancy creates pockets of unprotected sub-populations that can become hotspots for outbreak emergence.

In the new study, researchers createdto explain how clusters of vaccination behavior are shaped by two—social selection, the pre-existence of socio-demographic clusters; and social influence, the spread of ideas between populations.

The models found that both processes are independently capable of generating geographical clusters of high hesitancy. Moreover, they suggested that when a society trusts hesitancy propaganda, social selection plays an important role and many smaller clusters of hesitancy appear. When a society tends to be more skeptical about propaganda,overcomes and a few larger clusters appear, despite the same overall frequency of vulnerable communities.

The computational models also allowed the team to determine how intervention strategies can reduce both overall vaccine hesitancy, and the spatial clustering of vaccine hesitancy. They found that when social selection in a society is low, the most effective strategy involves targeting communities that are vulnerable due to their own socio-economic traits but also are surrounded by a socio-with a high tendency towards hesitancy.

Dr. Alvarez-Zuzek adds, "Social human behavior is complex, and understanding in the context of public health is very challenging. We believe that our findings are a step forward towards understanding the underlying processes that generate dangerous clustering in vaccine hesitancy and designing mitigation strategies to better protect vulnerable populations."


Explore further

Republicans and Blacks most hesitant to get COVID vaccine, spatial analysis finds

更多的信息:Spatial clustering in vaccination hesitancy: The role of social influence and social selection,PLoS Computational Biology(2022).DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010437
Journal information: PLoS Computational Biology

Citation: How does social behavior lead to clusters of vaccine hesitancy? (2022, October 13) retrieved 19 October 2022 from //www.pyrotek-europe.com/news/2022-10-social-behavior-clusters-vaccine-hesitancy.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
42shares

Feedback to editors