ArticleAnnals of the New York Academy of Sciences2025
Polarization in the COVID-19 pandemic: The impact of vaccination status and conspiracy theories.
Article in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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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
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- How the unvaccinated have been portrayed in the urban English-language Canadian popular press since the declared end of the COVID-19 pandemic emergency.Human vaccines & immunotherapeutics · 2026Article
- Article
- Polarization in the COVID-19 pandemic: The impact of vaccination status and conspiracy theories.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to a new social identity through vaccination status and yielded substantial polarization between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. Across two studies conducted via online platform Prolific, we examined the polarization between vaccinated and unvaccinated people in the United States. Study 1 (N = 646) revealed that vaccinated people were more polarized toward unvaccinated people than vice versa across a range of polarization indicators. Conspiracy beliefs moderated these effects. Higher conspiracy beliefs predicted increased polarization among unvaccinated people; however, lower conspiracy beliefs predicted increased polarization among vaccinated people. Study 2 (N = 503) focused specifically on feelings of hate and revealed that vaccinated and unvaccinated people were polarized toward different target groups. While vaccinated people expressed more hate toward unvaccinated people than vice versa, unvaccinated people expressed more hate toward the government. Additional analyses indicated that besides public health concerns, feelings of hate also predicted vaccinated people's support for excluding unvaccinated people from public places. These findings offer novel insight into the complex dynamics that help explain the polarization that occurred among both vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
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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.