COVID-19 vaccination, risk-compensatory behaviours, and contacts in the UK
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Abstract
The physiological effects of vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) are well documented, yet the behavioural effects are largely unknown. Risk compensation suggests that gains in personal safety, as a result of vaccination, are offset by increases in risky behaviour, such as socialising, commuting and working outside the home. This is potentially problematic because transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is driven by contacts, which could be amplified by vaccine-related risk compensation behaviours. Here, we show that behaviours were overall unrelated to personal vaccination, but - adjusting for variation in mitigation policies - were responsive to the level of vaccination in the wider population: individuals in the UK were risk compensating when rates of vaccination were rising. This effect was observed across four nations of the UK, each of which varied policies autonomously.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.11.15.21266255: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Limitations include that the survey is based on self-reported behaviours. Individuals tend to underreport socially undesirable/stigmatizing behaviours22, e.g. having many contacts during periods of strict lockdown, which could translate to reported vaccination behaviours. However, respondents were advised that their answers would be …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.11.15.21266255: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Limitations include that the survey is based on self-reported behaviours. Individuals tend to underreport socially undesirable/stigmatizing behaviours22, e.g. having many contacts during periods of strict lockdown, which could translate to reported vaccination behaviours. However, respondents were advised that their answers would be confidential and that the results from the survey would influence the government’s response to the pandemic, the survey was administered by the national statistics agency in the UK, and individuals were paid to participate. These factors lessen underreporting incentives23-25. Underreporting would lead to downward bias on estimates; for example, if individuals reported fewer physical contacts than they actually had, then our estimated probability of having these contacts would be lower than the true probability. The fact that only 36% reported having a physical contact in the week they received the vaccination – an increase of 10% compared to the week before the vaccination - suggests that some respondents either thought a vaccination appointment should not be counted as a physical contact or that they perhaps generally underreported contacts. Given this, we consider these results to be lower bounds of risk-compensatory behaviour. There are other behaviours that were not captured in these outcomes. For example, we did not capture non-work travel (e.g. trips made inter-/intra-regionally). Moreover, we did not account for the risk of the types of int...
Results from TrialIdentifier: We found the following clinical trial numbers in your paper:
Identifier Status Title ISRCTN21086382 NA NA 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.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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