JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Vaccination programs play a vital role in extending and enhancing people’s lives, avoiding diseases like measles, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and influenza from becoming fatal epidemics. Still, many people, including 20 million infants each year, have insufficient access to vaccines. Thus, promoting awareness of vaccination programs is crucial.

Objective:

To explore the potential usage of social media and its scalability and robustness in providing good and accurate information to people whether to receive vaccination for themselves or making up their mind on behalf of their children.

Methods:

The protocol for this review is registered in Prospero (CRD42022304229) and conducted in accordance with the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions. Searches were conducted in Medline, Embase, PsycInfo, CINAHL, CENTRAL, and Google Scholar. Only randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were eligible for inclusion. General public (adults, children, and adolescents) were included as the population. Interventions included were defined as platforms that provide the opportunity to share information as a two-way communication. These were compared to traditional interventions and teaching methods, described as control group. The outcomes from the included studies were days unvaccinated, vaccine acceptance, or uptake of vaccines compared to baseline. The studies were assessed for risk of bias by using the Cochrane risk of bias tool for RCTs, and the certainty of evidence using Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE-assessment).

Results:

Ten studies described in 12 articles published between 2012 and 2022, conducted in USA, China, Jordan, Australia, and Israel, were included in this review. The studies comprised Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and non-general purpose social media. The outcomes investigated in these studies were uptake of vaccine compared to baseline, vaccine acceptance, and days unvaccinated. The total sample size were 26286. The included studies varied between 58 and 21592 number of participants. The effect direction plot from the included articles of good and fair quality, shows that there is reason to believe that in a true setting, the result in each outcome domain would consist of an equal number of positive and negative results due to the interventions’ effect on uptake of vaccines and vaccine acceptance.

Conclusions:

This review shows that there is a basis for gathering experience to optimize the use of social media to increase vaccination rates. Social media can work as an instrument that potentially is able to transmit information to increase the vaccination rate in a population. But we cannot exclusively use social media as the only tool, since there are complex structures that work together when it comes to vaccine acceptance. Social media as a tool assumes that authorized personnel keep a close eye on and moderate the discussions.