COVID-19 vaccines have been available to Americans for more than a year now.

Vaccinations changed the American response to the pandemic, but so did vaccine refusal,

so did disinformation. So now that some time has passed, but with this still being a very

lie of issue, what do we know about belief and vaccine misinformation and why people have made

the decisions they have? What roles have media outlets played? Those are a couple of the questions

for this week's Reliable Sources podcast. So let's go ahead and cue the music.

I'm Brian Stelter, and this weekly podcast is our chance to go more in depth talking about how

the media world really works. So many of the stories in the past two years about COVID-19 have

related to media consumption to people's choices and habits and media patterns.

There is an increasing amount of research about COVID-19 vaccines and media and misinformation,

and what impact media choices have had. So I want to highlight that this week,

because we're in this period now coming off the Delta surge, off the Omicron surge,

with states relaxing restrictions with life once again returning to a form of normal.

And yet, what's happened with vaccines, what's happened with vaccine disinformation,

is going to have long lasting effects for this country and for the world.

There's a brand new study out about some of these topics, and I'm joined now by one of the authors.

Catherine O'Neill-Ova is on the faculty at Rutgers University. She is one of the founders and

a principal investigator for the COVID States project. This is a large multi-university initiative

that's been doing so much research exploring the social and political implications of COVID-19.

Report number 82 from the COVID States project is titled COVID-19 vaccine misinformation trends.

This is a pre-print. It has just been published this week, but there are some really important insights

I think we should unpack. So Catherine, welcome to the podcast.

...