Grant: APHC - Behavioural Sc. and Com.-Based Approaches to Address Mis-/Dis-Info.

From mpox to measles, vaccination is one of our best ways of controlling infectious disease outbreaks. However, barriers to vaccination-including misinformation-driven distrust in those providing vaccination and lack of confidence in vaccine safety or effectiveness-threaten our ability to stop epidemics. Many of these barriers may be reduced by improving our use of information to build trusted population health information systems: providing more accessible, credible, culturally-acceptable vaccine communication to counter mis- and disinformation that pollutes the vaccine communication ecosystem and conducting more thorough and transparent surveillance of vaccine coverage, safety, and effectiveness in diverse populations. I will fill current knowledge gaps in our understanding of effective health communication interventions and trusted surveillance systems that build long-term trust with populations through an integrated program of population health information intervention research focused on vaccination. My objectives are to: 1. Improve our understanding of what makes for effective population health information interventions, including communication and surveillance campaigns and technologies that are understood as trusted and trustworthy by the public. 2. Use community-based research, conducted in partnership with community organizations, people with lived experience, and health or social service providers, to evaluate and improve population health information interventions, including those targeting critical information literacy as well as those aiming to build trusted information and communication relationships between public health and populations. 3. Strengthen multidisciplinary collaborations between health and information scientists, researchers and practitioners, to better understand and address mis- and disinformation and what builds critical health literacy and trust in evidence-based information sources amidst polluted information ecosystems.