“…110–111). Some argue that vaccine hesitancy in the developed world is currently driven by the circulation of misinformation on social media (Rochel de Camargo, 2020, p. 3; see Suarez-Lledo & Alvarez-Galvez, 2021 for a systematic review of studies of medical misinformation on social media), which could explain why under-vaccination and delayed vaccination have been rising for some time in the USA, and reached a level that has been described as a ‘cultural epidemic’ in Europe (McIntosh, Janda, Ehrich, Pettoello-Mantovani, & Somekh, 2016; Salmon, Dudley, Glanz, & Omer, 2015). Many studies have found a link between vaccine hesitancy and exposure to online anti-vaccination materials, as well as to the conspiracy theories that they so often promote (Ahmed, Quinn, Hancock, Freimuth, & Jamison, 2018; Dunn, Leask, Zhou, Mandl, & Coiera, 2015; 2017; Lyons, Merola, & Reifler, 2019; Wilson & Wiysonge, 2021), and associations between coronavirus vaccine hesitancy, coronavirus conspiracy beliefs and/or use of social media or non-mainstream media as an information source have been reported (Allington, Duffy, Wessely, Dhavan, & Rubin, 2020; 2021; Bertin, Nera, & Delouvée, 2020; Freeman et al, 2020; Jennings et al, 2021; McAndrew & Allington, 2020; Murphy, Vallières, Bentall, Shevlin, & McBride, 2020; Romer & Jamieson, 2020), with one recent study finding among people whose news diet is dominated by social media an association between conspiracy mentality and the intention to discourage coronavirus vaccination (Chadwick et al, 2021).…”