[Air-L] Videos: COVID Vaccination Misinformation - 24 Feb 2021

[Matthew Moore]

Alex McIntosh: https://youtu.be/YDfisZ08M6U
Adam Dunn: https://youtu.be/B3rQM79Pi18
Heidi Larson: https://youtu.be/NJRsNcZH4ho
Q&A: https://youtu.be/gwO65A_bIf8

As a result of a massive medical effort, we now have multiple vaccines for COVID-19. However developing vaccines is not sufficient to solve this planetary challenge, people have to take them. Vaccination is a communications and information challenge as well as a biomedical one. In the session, we will discuss:
- Why people are hesitant to take vaccines
- The role that different actors (e.g. governments, tech companies, the general public) play in vaccine information provision
- What this means for the effective roll out of the COVID-19 vaccines, particularly in Australia

Alex McIntosh is strategy lead at Reset Australia, a research and advocacy organisation focused on preventing digital harms to democracy, with a current focus on the rising wave of medical and COVID-19 misinformation and the threat it poses to our vaccine rollout. Over the past year she launched Misinformation Medic - a campaign raising public awareness of social media platforms roles in amplifying harmful content during the COVID-19 pandemic. She also led the development of Reset Australia’s Live List policy - a proposal which would mandate transparency from the social media platforms to equip health experts with the data they need to tackle COVID-19 misinformation.

Adam Dunn is Head of Biomedical Informatics and Digital Health at the University of Sydney. His research programs are focused applied machine learning in clinical epidemiology and public health. The multidisciplinary teams he leads have examined the epidemiology of health misinformation for more than 5 years. Their work includes the first analyses to examine associations between estimates of information exposure and vaccination coverage, and now looks at when and how to address health misinformation safely and effectively in online communities.

Heidi J. Larson, PhD, is Professor of Anthropology, Risk and Decision Science and is the Founding Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She is also Clinical Professor of Health Metrics Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, USA, and Guest Professor at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Dr. Larson previously headed Global Immunisation Communication at UNICEF, chaired GAVI’s Advocacy Task Force, and served on the WHO SAGE Working Group on vaccine hesitancy. She is author of STUCK: How Vaccine Rumors Start – and Why They Don’t Go Away (Oxford U Press, 2020)

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