29 It’s Complicated . . . : Exploring Vaccination Attitudes and the Vaccination Infodemic in the UK throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic

In 2019, the United Kingdom (UK) lost its "measles free" status because of lower inoculation rates, which led to regional outbreaks of measles (New Scientist 2020). At its heart, the global anti-vaccination movement represents a fundamental challenge for risk and safety communication. However, with nearly 80% of its adults vaccinated against COVID-19 (Taylor 2021), it would seem that the UK has reduced its vaccine hesitancy. Unfortunately, there is little evidence regarding how vaccine attitudes have changed across the pandemic anywhere, let alone in the UK. Additionally, while the topic of information consumption has been central to the risk and safety communication endeavor throughout the pandemic (Allington et al. 2021), it is not clear whether the pandemic has changed Brits' attitudes about vaccine consumption either. Because of the high British death rates throughout COVID and its emergent focus on a strategy of persuading its population to get the COVID-19 vaccination above all other risk mitigation efforts, the world has been watching the UK (Taylor 2021). Therefore, data compare the ways that Brits evaluate vaccine attitudes and attitudes about information consumption in a repeated-measures design from before the pandemic (January 2020) and two points during the pandemic - just before the COVID vaccines were available (October/November 2020) and after most people had access to the vaccines (May 2021). Findings indicate: (1) the pandemic has worsened vaccine attitudes in the UK; (2) the pandemic has created conditions of health uncertainty; (3) the pandemic has changed trust in three critical sources of health information; and (4) exposure to pro- and anti-vaccine messages over time affect information processing and judgments of vaccine information. As a result, over time people found it more difficult to recognize pro- and anti-vaccination messages found anti-vaccination messages more believable. Implications for these findings are discussed.