Survey of Attitudes on Personal Protection Interventions Against COVID-19 Including MMR Vaccination and Future Anti-COVID Vaccines

  1. Joseph D. Schulman
  2. James N. Cooper
  3. Gary W. Crooks

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Abstract

An electronic survey was conducted in October, 2020 among individuals primarily age 60 and older regarding their degree of confidence of deriving personal protection from 8 different anti-COVID interventions – social isolation, lockdowns, avoiding restaurants, taking MMR vaccine, wearing masks when indoors with others, avoiding hotels, avoiding commercial air travel, and using the first future specific anti-COVID vaccine. Responses were received from 135 persons from many different U.S. regions and 5 foreign countries. Respondents were generally individuals with very high levels of education and personal achievement. Results demonstrated wide diversity of responses regarding each of these interventions. None were strongly supported by a majority of respondents, but those receiving the largest proportions of strong support were social isolation (41%), wearing masks indoors (41%), and using the first anti-COVID vaccine (41%). MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccination was viewed much more positively than negatively but had the highest proportion of individuals who felt they had insufficient data to formulate an opinion. The largest number of strong negative assessments were toward lockdowns (37%). We speculate that the wide variation in perception of possible benefits from the surveyed interventions, most of which have been widely practiced by or imposed upon millions of individuals, in this highly accomplished older population at increased personal risk from COVID-19 reflects the current absence of rigorous scientific proof of the efficacy of any these interventions, and the continuation of the epidemic despite the widespread utilization of most of them.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.21.20215251: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    All data was entered into and analyzed using Excel spreadsheets and the numerical results used to create graphs showing the distribution of answers regarding each intervention.
    Excel
    suggested: None

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.10.21.20215251v1 on medRxiv