Public health partnerships with faith-based organizations to support vaccination uptake among minoritized communities: A scoping review.

Faith-based vaccine initiatives are of growing interest to public health agencies who are looking to increase vaccine confidence among ethnoracially minoritized populations. Despite evidence that support faith-based organizations' (FBOs) partnerships with public health agencies (PHAs) to increase vaccine confidence, reviews on the scope and efforts to ensure equitable vaccination delivery for ethnoracially minoritized populations are scarce. We aimed to understand how public health agencies collaborate with FBOs or faith communities to improve vaccine confidence among minoritized communities in high-, low- and middle- income countries. We conducted a scoping review by searching OVID MEDLINE, Cochrane Library, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), SCOPUS, and PROQUEST from 2011 to 2023. We included case studies, news reports, observational studies, experimental, and quasi-experimental studies and multimedia content that describes PHA-FBO partnerships that created vaccine initiatives for marginalized and minoritized communities. The data was extracted, summarized, and results were described narratively. We included 167 initiatives reported in 160 publications; 83.8% of the included articles were published between 2019 to 2023. The interventions carried out by PHA-FBO partnerships attempted to increase vaccine uptake using any or all the following methods. First, the initiatives provided digital and in-person platforms for interfaith learning and established training programs to empower faith leaders to become vaccine ambassadors. Second, the initiatives designed and disseminated education and awareness materials that aimed to be sensitive to religious and gender norms. Third, PHA-FBO partnered to apply equity and faith-based frameworks and provided wrap-around support to enable equitable vaccine access. Majority of the initiatives reported that PHA-FBO partnerships improved vaccine confidence and uptake (71.3%). About 22.2% of the initiatives reported quantitative outcomes post-intervention. PHA-FBO initiatives over the past decade increased vaccine uptake and acceptance among diverse ethnoracially minoritized populations. Reporting of faith-based initiatives are subject to publication bias and can be strengthened by examining more evaluation studies and establishment of key outcome indicators to critically appraise intervention outcomes.

Faith-based organisations and their role in supporting vaccine confidence and uptake: a scoping review protocol.

INTRODUCTION: Faith-based organisations (FBOs) and religious actors increase vaccine confidence and uptake among ethnoracially minoritised communities in low-income and middle-income countries. During the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent vaccine rollout, global organisations such as the WHO and UNICEF called for faith-based collaborations with public health agencies (PHAs). As PHA-FBO partnerships emerge to support vaccine uptake, the scoping review aims to: (1) outline intervention typologies and implementation frameworks guiding interventions; (2) describe the roles of PHAs and FBOs in the design, implementation and evaluation of strategies and (3) synthesise outcomes and evaluations of PHA-FBO vaccine uptake initiatives for ethnoracially minoritised communities. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: We will perform six library database searches in PROQUEST-Public Health, OVID MEDLINE, Cochrane Library, CINAHL, SCOPUS- all, PROQUEST - Policy File index; three theses repositories, four website searches, five niche journals and 11 document repositories for public health. These databases will be searched for literature that describe partnerships for vaccine confidence and uptake for ethnoracially minoritised populations, involving at least one PHA and one FBO, published in English from January 2011 to October 2023. Two reviewers will pilot-test 20 articles to refine and finalise the inclusion/exclusion criteria and data extraction template. Four reviewers will independently screen and extract the included full-text articles. An implementation science process framework outlining the design, implementation and evaluation of the interventions will be used to capture the array of partnerships and effectiveness of PHA-FBO vaccine uptake initiatives. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: This multiphase Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) project received ethics approval from the University of Toronto. Findings will be translated into a series of written materials for dissemination to CIHR, and collaborating knowledge users (ie, regional and provincial PHAs), and panel presentations at conferences to inform the development of a best-practices framework for increasing vaccine confidence and uptake.

Public Officials' Engagement on Social Media During the Rollout of the COVID-19 Vaccine: Content Analysis of Tweets.

BACKGROUND: Social media is an important way for governments to communicate with the public. This is particularly true in times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, during which government officials played a strong role in promoting public health measures such as vaccines. OBJECTIVE: In Canada, provincial COVID-19 vaccine rollout was delivered in 3 phases aligned with federal government COVID-19 vaccine guidance for priority populations. In this study, we examined how Canadian public officials used Twitter to engage with the public about vaccine rollout and how this engagement has shaped public response to vaccines across jurisdictions. METHODS: We conducted a content analysis of tweets posted between December 28, 2020, and August 31, 2021. Leveraging the social media artificial intelligence tool Brandwatch Analytics, we constructed a list of public officials in 3 jurisdictions (Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia) organized across 6 public official types and then conducted an English and French keyword search for tweets about vaccine rollout and delivery that mentioned, retweeted, or replied to the public officials. We identified the top 30 tweets with the highest impressions in each jurisdiction in each of the 3 phases (approximately a 26-day window) of the vaccine rollout. The metrics of engagement (impressions, retweets, likes, and replies) from the top 30 tweets per phase in each jurisdiction were extracted for additional annotation. We specifically annotated sentiment toward public officials' vaccine responses (ie, positive, negative, and neutral) in each tweet and annotated the type of social media engagement. A thematic analysis of tweets was then conducted to add nuance to extracted data characterizing sentiment and interaction type. RESULTS: Among the 6 categories of public officials, 142 prominent accounts were included from Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. In total, 270 tweets were included in the content analysis and 212 tweets were direct tweets by public officials. Public officials mostly used Twitter for information provision (139/212, 65.6%), followed by horizontal engagement (37/212, 17.5%), citizen engagement (24/212, 11.3%), and public service announcements (12/212, 5.7%). Information provision by government bodies (eg, provincial government and public health authorities) or municipal leaders is more prominent than tweets by other public official groups. Neutral sentiment accounted for 51.5% (139/270) of all the tweets, whereas positive sentiment was the second most common sentiment (117/270, 43.3%). In Ontario, 60% (54/90) of the tweets were positive. Negative sentiment (eg, public officials criticizing vaccine rollout) accounted for 12% (11/90) of all the tweets. CONCLUSIONS: As governments continue to promote the uptake of the COVID-19 booster doses, findings from this study are useful in informing how governments can best use social media to engage with the public to achieve democratic goals.

From Facebook to YouTube: The Potential Exposure to COVID-19 Anti-Vaccine Videos on Social Media.

This article examines the role of Facebook and YouTube in potentially exposing people to COVID-19 vaccine-related misinformation. Specifically, to study the potential level of exposure, the article models a uni-directional information-sharing pathway beginning when a Facebook user encounters a vaccine-related post with a YouTube video, follows this video to YouTube, and then sees a list of related videos automatically recommended by YouTube. The results demonstrate that despite the efforts by Facebook and YouTube, COVID-19 vaccine-related misinformation in the form of anti-vaccine videos propagates on both platforms. Because of these apparent gaps in platform-led initiatives to combat misinformation, public health agencies must be proactive in creating vaccine promotion campaigns that are highly visible on social media to overtake anti-vaccine videos' prominence in the network. By examining related videos that a user potentially encounters, the article also contributes practical insights to identify influential YouTube channels for public health agencies to collaborate with on their public service announcements about the importance of vaccination programs and vaccine safety.

Examining algorithmic biases in YouTube's recommendations of vaccine videos.

OBJECTIVE: This research examines how YouTube recommends vaccination-related videos. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We used a social network analysis to evaluate how YouTube recommends vaccination related videos to its users. RESULTS: More pro-vaccine videos (64.75%) than anti-vaccine (19.98%) videos are on YouTube, with 15.27% of videos being neutral in sentiment. YouTube was more likely to recommend neutral and pro-vaccine videos than anti-vaccine videos. There is a homophily effect in which pro-vaccine videos were more likely to recommend other pro-vaccine videos than anti-vaccine ones, and vice versa. DISCUSSION: Compared to our prior study, the number of recommendations for pro-vaccine videos has significantly increased, suggesting that YouTube's demonization policy of harmful content and other changes to their recommender algorithm might have been effective in reducing the visibility of anti-vaccine videos. However, there are concerns that anti-vaccine videos are less likely to lead users to pro-vaccine videos due to the homophily effect observed in the recommendation network. CONCLUSION: The study demonstrates the influence of YouTube's recommender systems on the types of vaccine information users discover on YouTube. We conclude with a general discussion of the importance of algorithmic transparency in how social media platforms like YouTube decide what content to feature and recommend to its users.