Trial reportBMJ open2022
Negative consequences of failing to communicate uncertainties during a pandemic: an online randomised controlled trial on COVID-19 vaccines.
Trial report in BMJ open, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Interventions Addressing Vaccine Hesitancy in the WHO European Region and in North America (United States and Canada): A Systematic Review.Public health reviews · 2026Pooled it
- A systematic review of communication interventions for countering vaccine misinformation.Vaccine · 2023Pooled it
- Fighting fire with fire: Prebunking with the use of a plausible meta-conspiracy framing.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Beyond coexistence: the asymmetric interplay of health risk and promotion pathways driven by communication legacies across emerging and recurring epidemics.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Informed decisions about public health and social measures.Health research policy and systems · 2025Review
- Uncertainty communication, trust and health promotion.Health promotion and chronic disease prevention in Canada : research, policy and practice · 2025Article
- Article
- Paracetamol Use and COVID-19 Clinical Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Review
- The effects of communicating uncertainty around statistics, on public trust.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Public views of and reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic in England: a qualitative study with diverse ethnicities.BMJ open · 2022Article
- Interventions to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake: a scoping review.The Cochrane database of systematic reviews · 2022Article
- The Effectiveness of Interventions for Increasing COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake: A Systematic Review.Vaccines · 2022Review
- Training calibration-based counterfactual explainers for deep learning models in medical image analysis.Scientific reports · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveTo examine the impact of the government communicating uncertainties relating to COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness on vaccination intention and trust after people are exposed to conflicting information.
designExperimental design where participants were randomly allocated to one of two groups.
settingOnline.
participants328 adults from a UK research panel.
interventionParticipants received either certain or uncertain communications from a government representative about COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness, before receiving conflicting information about effectiveness.
main outcome measuresVaccination intention and trust in government.
resultsCompared with those who received the uncertain announcement from the government, participants who received the certain announcement reported a greater loss of vaccination intention (d
conclusionsCommunicating with certainty about COVID-19 vaccines reduces vaccination intention and trust if conflicting information arises, whereas communicating uncertainties can protect people from the negative impact of exposure to conflicting information. There are likely to be other factors affecting vaccine intentions, which we do not account for in this study. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/c73px/.
Indexed as
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.