COVID-19 vaccine misinformation in English-language news media: retrospective cohort study.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

To describe COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and track trends over time in traditional news media.

Design

Retrospective cohort study of a large database of online articles, July 2020-June 2021.

Setting

English-language articles from 100 news outlets with the greatest reach.

Main outcome measures

Numbers and percentages of articles containing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation over the study period. Further analysis by misinformation themes and whether articles included primary misinformation, fact-checking or simply referred to misinformation.

Results

41 718 (3.2% of all COVID-19 vaccine articles) contained at least one of the vaccine misinformation themes based on the Boolean string developed for this study. The volume of such articles increased

SUBMITTER: Lurie P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9160593 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature