The paper “Online Misinformation is Linked to Early COVID-19 Vaccination Hesitancy and Refusal”, authored by Francesco Pierri from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano, has been ranked among the TOP-100 articles in Nature Scientific Reports and has garnered more than 19,000 accesses and 27 citations. The paper has also been cited in the 2023 Economic Report of the President issued by the Council of Economic Advisers of the current US administration together with the Executive Office of the President of the United States.
Pierri’s research, undertaken within the Horizon 2020 PERISCOPE project in collaboration with the Indiana University, confirmed a statistically significant association between the amount of misinformation shared online and the tendency to refuse or delay vaccination in the United States. In particular, in the states and counties where the most online misinformation is consumed, there is greater vaccination hesitancy and, consequently, lower vaccination coverage.