The Effect of Resistance to Epidemic Measures on Disease Spread and Mortality – What’s the Role of Online Misinformation?

Aim: The REMEDY project will provide innovative interdisciplinary empirical research that explores the driver and health

consequences of resistant behaviour against epidemic measures, leveraging social science insights, economic and statistical methods

and data science techniques.

Background: In the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, one pressing challenge for the public health response is the general resistance

to legitimate public health policies driven by news media, influencers, extremist politicians, and rampant misinformation circulated

on the internet – a potential information disorder due to an “infodemic”. There is, however, little understanding of the mechanism

through which these potentially malicious messages propagate and how they, in turn, influence the behaviour of the population in

opposing vaccine, mask-wearing, mobility restrictions, social distancing, and consequently leading to higher levels of morbidity and

mortality.

Methods: This project employs different quantitative and research methodologies to estimate the effects of behavioural resistance on

the epidemic spread and excess mortality and whether online misinformation explains this resistance behaviour. First, we link real-world data on vaccine refusal, fines for non-compliance and the frequency and scale of anti-mask/vax/digital COVID-19 certificate

protests to the local epidemic spread, hospitalisation and excess mortality rate over time. Second, after identifying the different types

of online misinformation on COVID-19 and vaccines, we use geo-tagged digital records on search engines and social media to analyse

the association between online sentiments towards public health measures and real-world resistance behaviour at a specific geographic unit.

Impact: The project will not only provide hard evidence on the linkage between resistance behaviour and population health

outcomes, but will also present the gravity of precariously allowing misinformation to flourish on the internet.