Digital Information Environment

What increases vaccine demand and uptake?

COVID-19 accelerated the unprecedented spread of misinformation around vaccine safety and efficacy. The WHO ranks this ‘infodemic’ as one of the ten global threats to global public health. Disinformation around COVID-19 vaccines has rapidly advanced the loss of public trust and confidence in immunization. Increasingly more vaccine adopters have become vaccine-hesitant now. Building trust and demand in immunization services and counteracting the rapid spread of misinformation on vaccine safety have become more critical than ever to increasing overall vaccination coverage and stopping the declining confidence in all vaccines.

This workstream is committed to helping countries improve their vaccination coverage rates by working with local partners, including ministries of health by providing innovative behavior-oriented tools, capacity building and social listening initiatives.

This workstream aims to address misinformation and strengthen digital engagement. It brings together various global organisations and institutions, experts, practitioners, academia and civil society organisations to develop and share effective tools and approaches.

The primary objective of this workstream is to build capacity to mitigate potential disruptions to demand for vaccines stemming from misinformation and information gaps by providing thought leadership and technical support.

The goals of this workstream are to:

  • Ensure continued leadership in this digital environment by bringing together core strengths of each partner to implement social listening and engagement strategies for vaccines.
  • Maintain close coordination between partner agencies on social listening and misinformation management while sharing learnings, research, tools and initiatives.
  • Strengthen the long-term capacity of government and other national immunization partners to track and manage misinformation and information needs so that communication strategies can address vaccine hesitancy to drive demand for immunization.

What tools are available?

A compilation of tools is available across the partners. These tools look at establishing social listening systems and dashboards at the country level to other specific capacity-building tools for social analysts/infodemic managers at the country level. For example, the WHO supported Infodemic Managers training, a comprehensive training covering core capacities that an infodemic manager needs. Some of the tools currently available include:

To access additional resources, visit the Knowledge Base.

Next steps in this work

  • Continue to facilitate the exchange of information while contributing to the global knowledge and sharing of best practices among members.
  • Support research and dissemination of promising approaches to conducting social listening to inform prevention and mitigation efforts around vaccine misinformation.
  • Support efforts to develop training material, tools and guidance for use in regional and country-level capacity enhancement initiatives.