Newsletter
N°01 – March 2024
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Dear members of the SHS-vaccination-France network,
We are pleased to send you this first newsletter, which will be published every two months. Its aim is to keep you informed about news in the network (new members, publications, etc.) or of interest to the network (conferences, calls for projects, etc.). We also focus and comment on a short selection of recent publications. Please don’t hesitate to send us any information you would like to see included in this newsletter.
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Foreword from the coordinators
We are delighted to announce our first online seminar (zoom link to follow), to be held on Friday 12 April from 2 to 4 pm. This first seminar will be in French and will be devoted to the notion of vaccine hesitancy, with a presentation by Patrick Peretti-Watel entitled “Que faire de l’hésitation vaccinale? Un point de vue sociologique”, and will be followed by a group discussion. It will also be an opportunity to discuss the members’ scientific news (calls for projects, projects, analyses in progress, publications, etc.), as well as the content and organisation of forthcoming seminars. We would like to invite anyone wishing to present their work in progress at future sessions to contact us.
Séance 1 : Que faire de l’hésitation vaccinale ? Un point de vue sociologique.
Forgée au début des années 2010 par les experts de l’OMS, la notion d’hésitation vaccinale est devenue presque incontournable pour les chercheurs s’intéressant aux attitudes et aux comportements vaccinaux. Il n’est sans doute pas exagéré de dire que cette notion a bouleversé l’appréhension des résistances vaccinales en santé publique, mais qu’apporte-t-elle aux sciences sociales ? Il s’agira ici de revenir sur ce bouleversement, mais aussi de resituer l’hésitation vaccinale dans le dispositif des politiques publiques, pour mieux en apprécier la portée et les limites, avant de proposer des pistes de recherche complémentaires.
We would also like to remind all members of the network to let us know about their publications and news so that we can circulate them via the website and the newsletter and include them in future versions of the report “Research on the human and social aspects of vaccination in France since Covid-19“
Sincerely,
Patrick, Jeremy & Pierre
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Since the network was launched at the end of January, 42 researchers and research teams have joined the France network. The network brings together a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (sociology, economics, cognitive psychology, clinical psychology, political science, philosophy, anthropology, information and communication sciences, geography, history) and public health (vaccinology, epidemiology, pharmacology, paediatrics, immunology, etc.). The network also has 22 international friends working in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Greece, Brazil, the United States, Austria, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Poland.
We hope to continue expanding the network, so please spread the word!
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News of interest to the network
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Conferences
We invite network members to let us know about forthcoming events, calls for papers and articles, funding opportunities, searches for partners, etc. relating directly to the issue of vaccines in France and abroad, but also to related issues.
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Publications by network members
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The purpose of the newsletter is to inform you of publications by members of the network. For this first edition, while we wait for the practice of systematically notifying us of your publications of interest to become established, we have made a selection of your recent publications. As with the news, we invite network members to let us know directly of any publications you would like to see included in this list.
- NM Peretti-Watel P, Verger P, Ward JK,To understand mRNA vaccine hesitancy, stop calling the public anti-science, Nature Medicine, 2024.
- Borin L, Hammarlin MM, Kokkinakis D, Miegel,Vaccine Hesitancy in the Nordic Countries Trust and Distrust During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Routledge, 2024.
- McDonell S, Attwell K, McKenzie L,Including the isolated: Place, rurality, and the state in regional Western Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine rollout, SSM-Qualitative Research in Health, 2024.
- Adam Hannah, Katie Attwell, Jordan Tchilingirian, Trust, capacity and management of vaccine rollouts, in Dickinson H, Yates S, O’Flynn J, Smith C,Research Handbook on Public Management and COVID-19, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024.
- Attwell et al.,The collaboration on social science and immunisation (COSSI): Global lessons from a successful Australian research and practice network, Vaccine, 2024.
- Altay S,Who is concerned about misinformation and why? Evidence from 46 countries between 2018 and 2023, Psyarxiv, 2024.
- Cordonier L, Information et santé, Fondation Descartes, 2023.
- Cologna et al,Trust in scientists and their role in society across 67 countries, preprint, 2024.
- Leigh et al,The evolution of vaccine hesitancy through the COVID-19 pandemic: A semi-structured interview study on booster and bivalent doses, Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, 2024.
- Dionne et al.,Change in intention and hesitancy regarding COVID-19 vaccines in a cohort of adults in Quebec during the pandemic, Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, 2024.
- Heyerdahl et al,Outsciencing the scientists: a cross-sectional mixed-methods investigation of public trust in scientists in seven European countries, BMJ Public Health, 2023.
- Burau et al,Post-COVID health policy responses to healthcare workforce capacities: a comparative analysis of health system resilience in six European countries. Health Policy, 2024.
- Larson H, Lin L,Generative artificial intelligence can have a role in combating vaccine hesitancy, BMJ, 2024.
- McKinley CJ, Choi JA, Luo Y,Expressing Uncertainty and Risk About the Mpox Outbreak: A Textual Analysis of Twitter Messaging, Communication Studies, 2024.
- Bruel et al,The intentions of French health university students to recommend and to receive the HPV vaccine are mainly influenced by vaccine knowledge, confidence in vaccines and personal HPV vaccination, Vaccine, 2024.
- Tron et al,Barriers and facilitators to the HPV vaccine: a multicenter qualitative study of French general practitioners, Archives of Public Health, 2024
- Karlsson et al, Healthcare professionals’ attitudes to mandatory COVID-19 vaccination: Cross-sectional survey data from four European countries, Human Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics, 2023.
- Raffard S, Bayard S, Tattard P, Laraki Y, Capdevielle D, Cross-sectional study on the dissociation of decision-making capacity for antipsychotic treatment and COVID-19 vaccination in individuals with schizophrenia, Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2023.
- Garrouste C, Juet A, Samson AL,Direct and Crowding-out effects of Hepatitis B vaccination campaign, Economics and Human Biology, 2023.
- Thuilliez J, Touré N,Opinions and vaccination during an epidemic, Journal of Mathematical Economics, 2024.
- Peretti-Watel et al.,Social Stigma and COVID-19 Vaccine Refusal in France. Journal of Health Politics Policy and Law, 2024.
- Ward et al, Research on the human and social aspects of vaccination in France since Covid-19 – 1st Edition, CNRS-INSERM-ORS Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Villejuif, 192 pages, 2024
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Reports from the ERC Horizon 2020 « Vax-Trust : Adressing Vaccine Hesitancy in Europe » (coord. Pia Vuolanto, Tampere University, Finland), https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/965280/results ; https://vax-trust.eu/
The Vax-Trust ERC project, which came to an end in February 2024, aimed to gain a better understanding of vaccine hesitancy in Europe and to improve the experience of vaccine issues among healthcare professionals and members of the public. Based on fieldwork using a variety of methods in 7 countries (Finland, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Italy, the UK and Belgium), the project also set out to develop intervention tools for healthcare professionals. Among the many products of this project, we would like to draw attention to the very rich reports posted online on the European Commission’s website and freely accessible to all. The project teams have produced reports detailing, for each country, the data available on the public’s attitude to vaccination, the issues facing healthcare professionals, the state of the media debate and other factors that help us to understand the specific nature of vaccination in each country. In these reports, researchers from the social sciences stress the importance of taking these contextual elements into account, pointing out that the effect of certain so-called structural variables such as income, gender or ethnic identification can play out very differently from one country to another. As well as laying the foundations for a wide-ranging reflection on the various facets of trust at play around vaccines – a reflection developed further in the scientific articles published as a result of this project – these reports are valuable resources for anyone wishing to learn more about the issues faced by vaccines in these countries or to compare the French situation with that of other European countries. It was in this same spirit that we wrote our report “Research into the human and social aspects of vaccination in France since 2020 – 1st edition”, and we hope that this type of initiative will become widespread in other countries.
Ruggeri et al., A synthesis of evidence for policy from behavioural science during COVID-19, Nature, 625(7993), 2024.
In April 2020, the journal Nature Human Behaviour published an article co-authored by around forty researchers, highlighting the issues surrounding people’s behaviour in a pandemic context, and listing nineteen useful proposals for the policies to be implemented in such a context, relating to risk perception, trust, identity issues and communication. Only one proposal specifically concerned vaccination (“fake news, conspiracy theories and misinformation will increase vaccine hesitancy”), but most of them were sufficiently general to also concern vaccination. This article had a considerable academic and political echo. The article published in 2024 revisits its 19 proposals, mobilising 72 experts to dissect more than 700 articles published in 2020-2022, and testing these proposals: are they confirmed in practice, and to what extent? In the end, only one effect was judged to be strong (large – you’ll have to read the paper to find out which), a few were judged to be medium, and half were judged to be small. The exercise is instructive, even if the proposals tested often appear to be common sense, such as the one quoted above on vaccine hesitancy, for which the effect is judged to be medium. It calls into question certain taken-for-granted principles, such as the idea that messages which emphasise the benefits for the recipient are more convincing. However, from a methodological point of view, it should be emphasised that qualitative research was excluded from the analysis. From the point of view of public action, these results should not be taken too literally either: if community-based approaches for marginalised populations are credited with a weak effect, this is no reason to give up on them.
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Focus on one publication from the ICOVAC-France project
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Peretti-Watel, P., Fressard, L., Giry, B., Verger, P., & Ward, J. K. (2024). Social Stigma and COVID-19 Vaccine Refusal in France. Journal of health politics, policy and law, 11186095.
In 2021, the French health authorities strongly promoted vaccination against Covid19. We assumed that refusal of this vaccine had become a “stigma” and we studied the opinions and attitudes of vaccinated adults towards non-vaccinated people in the French population. A representative sample of the adult population (N=2,015) completed an online questionnaire in September 2021. We restricted ourselves to participants already vaccinated against Covid-19, or intending to be vaccinated (N=1,742). In terms of attitudes towards unvaccinated people, a majority of respondents supported a number of pejorative statements, while a minority supported distancing attitudes. For example, 65% felt that non-vaccinated adults did not care enough about the health of their loved ones, 62% that they lacked civic-mindedness, 59% that they were selfish; 28% said that they could not go out with someone who had not been vaccinated, and 27% avoided socialising with non-vaccinated people. A classification analysis identified four contrasting attitude profiles: total stigmatisation (combining strong moral condemnation and social rejection: 26% of respondents), moral condemnation (32%), no stigmatisation (26%) and rejection of stigmatisation (16%). Early vaccination, civic motivation for vaccination, faith in science, rejection of political extremes and being aged 65 or over were the main attitudinal factors associated with the first two profiles (total stigmatisation and moral condemnation). While these results suggest that the refusal of the Covid-19 vaccination did give rise to public stigma, further research is needed, in particular to study the stigma perceived by those who were not vaccinated. We discuss our findings with reference to the concept of ‘Folk Devils’ (a scapegoat, a stereotypical figure described pejoratively and presented as a threat to society) and from a public health perspective.
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Upcoming newsletter June 2024
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SHS & vaccination network France
In France, as elsewhere, the Covid-19 pandemic has been an extraordinary catalyst for research in the Social and Human Sciences (SHS) on vaccine-related issues. Created with the support of the ANRS-MIE, the SHS Vaccination France network is intended for all those interested in such research. It aims to foster contacts, exchanges and collaborations between its members. It distributes information and news (calls for projects, job offers, symposia, publications, etc.) via a newsletter (registration details below) and regularly organizes scientific meetings.
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