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Health Sentiments in Populations

Dr Nick Jones (Mathematics) 

This suite of projects considers how health sentiments depend on socio-demographic conditions of individuals and on their social relations. We have worked with the EU, WHO and Indian partners studying variation in the proportions of people being vaccinated and in the rate at which people express concerns about vaccination. We also study the role of social networks and how they can be inferred given partial behavioural information.

The project participants are:

• Alex de Figueiredo PDRA
• Till Hoffmann PDRA
• Antonia Godoy-Lorite PDRA
• Sahil Loomba PhD student
• Matt Garrod PhD student
• Johannes Happenhoffer PhD student

The collaborators are:

• Heidi Larson from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
• Sumeet Agarwal from IIT Delhi

Outputs:

• Our work studying Vaccine confidence [A] was presented to a French National Commission on Vaccination and led to the expansion of mandated vaccines [1,2]. In turn this lead to marked drops in infections [3].
• Our work in [A,B] lead to us building a prototype inference tool to study Vaccine coverage with the WHO.
• We have secured a Gates grant with researchers at INCLEN, IIT Delhi and JNU concerning vaccine coverage and hesitancy in India.
• Our work [A] lead to a large-scale confidence survey by the Wellcome Trust — which is written up in [E].
• Our work [A] lead to two large-scale confidence surveys by the EU which is written up in [C,D].
• Our work [F] pointed towards a persuasive role for COVID vaccine misinformation and yielded an information video by UN [4].
• We showed how social network structure could be inferred from purely behavioural information and how changing inequalities could shift network structure and behaviour [F]. This work suggests influence strategies in public health campaigns [G].
• We inferred a metric for social distance between individuals which holds across societies. [H]
• We showed how to extract clusters/communities from sets of time series while averaging out over link uncertainties [K]
• We used UK surveys to predict areas and demographics likely to be vaccine hesitant with respect to COVID [L]

The output papers are:

Preprints:

[G]  
Influencing dynamics on social networks without knowledge of network microstructure
Matthew Garrod, Nick S. Jones
Subjects: Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph); Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech); Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Optimization and Control (math.OC

[F]
Inference and Influence of Large-Scale Social Networks Using Snapshot Population Behaviour without Network Data
Antonia Godoy-Lorite, Nick S. Jones
Subjects: Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph)

[L] Sub-national forecasts of COVID-19 vaccine acceptance across the UK: a large-scale cross-sectional spatial modelling study
A de Figueiredo
medRxiv  

Published:

[A] 
Ebiomedicine BLOG article, Commentary, Science article
Heidi Larson, Alex de Figueiredo, Xiahong Z, Will Schulz, Pierre Verger, Iain G. Johnston, Alex Cook, Nick S. Jones

[B] 
Lancet Global Health BLOG article, Commentary
Alex de Figueiredo, Iain G. Johnston, David M.D. Smith, Sumeet Agarwal, Heidi Larson, Nick S. Jones

[C] 
H Larson, A de Figueiredo, E Karafillakis, M Rawal
European Commission

[D] 
A de Figueiredo, E Karafillakis, H Larson
European Commission, https://ec.europa.eu/health/vaccination/confidence_en

[E] 
A de Figueiredo, C Simas, E Karafillakis, P Paterson, HJ Larson
The Lancet 396 (10255), 898-908

[F] 
S Loomba, A de Figueiredo, SJ Piatek, K de Graaf, HJ Larson
Nature Human Behaviour, 1-12

[H]
Journal of the Royal Society Interface, BLOG article
Hoffmann T, Jones NS

A de Figueiredo, F Were
The Lancet 393 (10183), 1779-1781

[K] 
Science Advances, BLOG articles
Hoffmann T, Peel L, Lambiotte R, Jones NS

Further material:
[1] Transcript from Concertation Citoyenne sur la Vaccination  Quote is from p262
[2] Lévy-Bruhl D, Desenclos JC, Quelet S, Bourdillon F., 2018, . 26;23 
[3] Lévy-Bruhl, D, Fonteneau, L, Vaux, S, Barret, AS, Antona, D, Bonmarin, I, Che, D, Quelet, S and Coignard, B, 2019, A, France. Eurosurveillance, 24;26. (Archived here)
[4]