Different vaccines, different trust issues? Disentangling the effect of trust in various institutions using dominance...

Vaccination campaigns involve a wide variety of institutional actors whether as producers of expertise, as decision-makers or as organizers and vaccinators. In this paper, we aim to compare the role of trust in a variety of institutions and actors on attitudes to vaccines in France, with a particular focus on the role of trust in scientific and political actors. We draw on a survey conducted in the summer of 2023 among a large sample of the French adult population (n = 4303, quota sampling with post-stratification weighting procedure). The survey combines a rich set of questions pertaining to vaccination (vaccination in general and vaccination against Covid-19, Measles, HPV, Hepatitis B and the Flu) as well as a set of items pertaining to trust in 13 institutions and actors (the CEVIPOF Trust Barometer). We use dominance analysis to compare the influence of distrust in each institution and actor on attitudes to a diversity vaccines and vaccination in general. We also compare them to other determinants of vaccine hesitancy such as sociodemographic status, political identities and scientific literacy. We find that, overall, trust in science tends to be an important determinant of attitudes to all vaccines. But we also found that trust in government agencies, and pharmaceutical companies are also crucial. We also found that the importance of trust in science varies depending on the vaccine: it bears particularly heavily on attitudes to vaccination in general and to vaccination against measles while trust in more political actors and political dispositions bear more heavily on attitudes to Covid-19 vaccination. Our study underlines the importance of tayloring interventions to the specificities faced by each vaccine as well as emphasizing how institutional decision-making processes guarantee the evidence-based nature of vaccination policies.