Research informs inquiry into falling vaccination uptake As childhood vaccination uptake declines in England and vaccine confidence becomes an increasing public health concern, research published in The BMJ is informing parliamentary debate on how governments should respond. 32 The 2024 paper, titled Behavioural considerations for vaccine misinformation and hesitancy on social media, 33 reviewed the evidence on behavioural interventions to address vaccine hesitancy driven by misinformation on social media. It highlights the importance of building trust, engaging credible community voices and improving access to reliable information as promising approaches to addressing vaccine hesitancy. In April 2026, the paper was cited in written evidence submitted by Professor Sander van der Linden, Kai Ruggeri and colleagues to the UK House of Lords Childhood Vaccinations Committee inquiry, which is examining the causes of declining vaccination uptake and policy options to improve coverage. 34
BMJ Impact Analytics shows that the paper has also been cited in policy documents from Public Health Scotland, the Welsh Government and other UK public health organisations. 35 The paper reached a wide public audience, placing it in the top 5% of all research outputs tracked by Altmetric: 36 ● 170 news stories from 117 international news outlets ● 157 discussions on the social media platform X ● 112 scholarly citations 37 ● coverage in six blogs
The dream of good academic research is to drive real world decision making. I was excited, obviously, going into The BMJ. I assumed there was a pretty good
chance that policymakers would see it. That's a great thing about The BMJ.” Kai Ruggeri, Professor of health policy and management, Columbia University, US
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