Message Fatigue and COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Uptake in the United States

Abstract

Dissemination of public health information plays an essential role in communicable disease control and prevention. However, widespread and repeated messaging could become counterproductive if it leads to avoidance and disengagement due to message fatigue. Americans have been inundated with accurate and inaccurate COVID-19 information from myriad sources since the start of the pandemic. Using the health belief model (HBM) as a guiding framework, this study examines COVID-19-related message fatigue among adults in the United States who have gotten at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and the association between message fatigue and COVID-19 booster uptake and intentions. A special survey module of The COVID States Project was fielded between August and September 2022 (n = 16,546). Results showed moderately high levels of message fatigue among vaccinated individuals. Message fatigue was negatively associated with the likelihood of having gotten a COVID-19 booster and intentions to do so among those who had not yet received a booster, above and beyond variance explained by the HBM constructs. These findings underscore the importance of monitoring and mitigating COVID-19-related message fatigue in encouraging the public to stay up to date with COVID-19 vaccination.

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge The COVID States Project for collecting the data. This work was supported by George Mason University and Fors Marsh. We also would like to thank colleagues at Fors Marsh for their assistance, including Lynne Lotenberg, Kevin Wehmueller, Jen Gibson, and Ronne Ostby. We are grateful to the hundreds of thousands of survey respondents who generously shared their time and responses.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Credit Statement

XZ, MK, EK, SM, LS, and LH conceptualized the study and developed the methodology. Formal analysis was conducted by XZ, XC, and MM. XZ, MK, EK, IP, and XC wrote the original draft and all authors engaged in review and editing. LH and XZ navigated funding and data support.

Data Availability Statement

For more information on access to the COVID States Project data, please go to https://www.covidstates.org/

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.