COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy and Information Diffusion: An Agent-based Modeling Approach

TL;DR

This study uses an agent-based model to show how information diffusion, especially negative messages, significantly impacts COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and hesitancy, highlighting the importance of opinion dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive agent-based simulation framework to quantify how information diffusion influences vaccine acceptance, incorporating socio-demographics and vaccine types.

Findings

Negative information spread increases vaccine hesitancy

Information diffusion significantly affects vaccine acceptance rates

Model calibrated with Canadian survey data supports the influence of opinions

Abstract

Despite the unprecedented success in the rapid development of several effective vaccines against the Cov-SARS-2, global vaccination rollout efforts suffer from vaccine distribution inequality and vaccine acceptance, leading to insufficient public immunity provided by the vaccine products. While a major current focus in vaccine acceptance research is how to model and inform vaccine acceptance based on social-demographic parameters, characteristics of vaccine acceptance are not well understood and in particular, it is not known whether and how information diffusion influences vaccine acceptance. This study examines how information diffusion can change vaccine acceptance by developing a comprehensive computational model with an agent-based simulation technique to overcome the modeling and quantification complexity associated with socio-demographics, vaccine types, population statistics, and information diffusion. Our analyses, calibrated by the vaccine acceptance survey data from the provinces and territories of Canada, provide clear evidence that the propagation of information can greatly influence vaccine acceptance rates. The results illustrate that spread of negative messages about the COVID-19 vaccines can cause significant vaccine hesitancy that challenges the goal of a high public immunity provided by the vaccines. Our findings might help solve the vaccine hesitancy problem by focusing more on individuals' opinions and behavior.