Ideology kills

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These are all useful indicators of potential vaccine refusal, but researchers have been hampered by the lack of actual data to confirm that yes, watching Fox News does in fact cause people to forego getting vaccinated. Now that more data are coming into focus. a new study appears to confirm what many surmised for themselves long ago: Fox News is a major contributing factor for people refusing the COVID-19 vaccines. Put more succinctly, this research suggests that the conservative media outlet has quite literally convinced millions of Americans to risk their health and even their lives.

In a working paper entitled, "Cable News and Covid-19 Vaccine Compliance," researchers at the ETHZurich Center for Law and Economics not only observed an association between lower vaccination rates among Fox News viewers since May, 2021, but established a causal connection as well. As the authors explain, the specific association between Fox and vaccine refusal is driven by the population of viewers under the age of 65, those the least likely to feel threatened by COVID-19. From the abstract:

We can rule out that the effect is due to differences in partisanship, to local health policies, or to local COVID-19 infections or death rates. The other two major television networks, CNN and MSNBC, have no effect, indicating that messaging matters and that the observed effect on vaccinations is not due the consumption of cable news in general. We also show that there is no historical effect of Fox News on flu vaccination rates, suggesting that the effect is COVID-19-specific and not driven by general skepticism toward vaccines.

Fox News viewership is directly tied to lower vaccination rates: study - Alternet.org