# An examination of childhood vaccine hesitancy in Brazil

> **NIH NIH P20** · UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT & ST AGRIC COLLEGE · 2024 · $208,911

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY: Sarah Nowak, PhD, Research Project Leader (RPL) 
The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified vaccine hesitancy as one of the top ten threats to global 
health. Vaccine hesitancy has been associated with beliefs that may be seemingly unrelated to vaccines, 
including both true conspiracy beliefs. When beliefs become part of the cultural norms of a group they are 
known as cultural scaffold beliefs; some cultural scaffold beliefs are strongly intertwined with perceptions of 
disease and vaccines. Nevertheless, most interventions developed to increase vaccine acceptance act on 
perceptions of either the vaccine-preventable disease (e.g., cautioning about risks) or the vaccine itself (e.g., 
messages about vaccine safety) without considering the underlying scaffold beliefs. Perhaps not surprisingly, 
the efficacy of such interventions has been disappointing. Our long-term goal is therefore to develop 
interventions that act on cultural scaffold beliefs to reduce global vaccine hesitancy. Increasing the voluntary 
vaccination rate could prevent up to 1.5 million deaths globally each year. 
In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro has endorsed and disseminated misinformation and false conspiracy 
theories about COVID-19 and its vaccines. Furthermore, Brazil has one of the world’s most successful 
childhood vaccination programs, making it an excellent case study to examine the relationship between 
COVID-19 misinformation cultural scaffold beliefs and adoption of vaccine-hesitant beliefs related to childhood 
vaccination. 
We will use social media data from Brazil to address our overarching hypothesis that vaccine hesitancy within 
a community is strongly influenced by prevailing cultural scaffold beliefs in the following three aims: 
Aim 1: Determine the association between COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs and childhood vaccine hesitancy. 
Aim 2: Determine how receipt of anti-vaccine versus pro-vaccine information influences decision making in 
vaccine-uncertain parents. 
Aim 3: Develop an agent-based modeling tool for studying the joint dynamics of cultural scaffold and vaccine 
hesitancy beliefs.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10894876
- **Project number:** 5P20GM125498-07
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT & ST AGRIC COLLEGE
- **Principal Investigator:** Sarah A Nowak
- **Activity code:** P20 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $208,911
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-09-15 → 2025-03-11

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10894876

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10894876, An examination of childhood vaccine hesitancy in Brazil (5P20GM125498-07). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10894876. Licensed CC0.

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