Resistance to COVID-19 vaccination and the social contract: evidence from Italy.

Confronted with stalled vaccination efforts against COVID-19, many governments embraced mandates and other measures to incentivize vaccination that excluded the unvaccinated from aspects of social and economic life. Even still, many citizens remained unvaccinated. We advance a social contract framework for understanding who remains unvaccinated and why. We leverage both observational and individual-level survey evidence from Italy to study the relationship between vaccination status and social context, social trust, political partisanship, and adherence to core institutional structures such as the rule of law and collective commitments. We find that attitudes toward the rule of law and collective commitments outside the domain of vaccination are strongly associated with compliance with vaccine mandates and incentives. Partisanship also corresponds with vaccine behaviors, as supporters of parties whose leaders criticized aggressive policies to incentivize or mandate vaccination and emphasized individual liberty are least likely to comply. Our findings suggest appeals emphasizing individual benefits may be more effective than appeals emphasizing collective responsibility.

The Relationship between US Adults' Misconceptions about COVID-19 Vaccines and Vaccination Preferences.

While mass vaccination has blunted the pandemic in the United States, pockets of vaccine hesitancy remain. Through a nationally representative survey of 1027 adult Americans conducted in February 2021, this study examined individual misconceptions about COVID-19 vaccine safety; the demographic factors associated with these misconceptions; and the relationship between misconceptions and willingness to vaccinate. Misconceptions about vaccine safety were widespread. A sizeable minority (40%) believed that vaccine side effects are commonly severe or somewhat severe; 85% significantly underestimated the size and scale of the clinical trials; and a sizeable share believed either that the vaccines contain live coronavirus (10%) or were unsure (38%), a proxy for fears that vaccination itself may cause infection. These misconceptions were particularly acute among Republicans, Blacks, individuals with lower levels of educational attainment, and unvaccinated individuals. Perceived side effect severity and underestimating the size of the clinical trials were both significantly associated with vaccine hesitancy.

Mitochondrial membrane potential: a novel biomarker of oxidative environmental stress.

Epidemiologic analyses, traditionally based on long-term cohort or case-control studies, provide retrospective causal associations between exposure to a particular environmental stressor and an exposure-related disease end point. Recent research initiatives have propelled a shift toward exploring molecular epidemiology and molecular biological markers (biomarkers) as a means of providing more immediate, quantitative risk assessment of potentially deleterious environmental exposures. We compared, in normal human monocytes isolated from the blood of healthy donors, variations in Hsp70 expression and mitochondrial membrane potential (delta psi m) in response to exposure to either tobacco smoke or gamma-irradiation, two models for environmentally mediated oxidant exposure. On the basis of its mechanistic specificity for oxidants and little baseline variation in cells from distinct individuals, we propose that delta psi m represents a selective in vitro and in vivo biomarker for oxidant exposure. delta psi m may be used to gauge risks associated with oxidant-mediated air pollution and radiation.