General vaccine trends in India 7

Vaccine Tracker: India began the second phase of vaccination against the novel coronavirus on 1 March, with people above 60 years of age and those above 45 with co-morbidities eligible to get the vaccinations.

1. Common Misinformation:

• Twitter decides to begin labeling #Covid #vaccine #misinformation. Twitter warns five-time violators will face permanent bans, just like with violations of its civic integrity policy

• According to a Facebook post, there are rumors that Chinese hackers are targeting Bharat Biotech and Serum Institute of India’s IT Systems. However, Power Ministry officials deny that India's power sector had suffered from Chinese malware attacks but confirms that attempts were made.

• The rumors that the pandemic is a conspiracy or a bioweapon is still doing rounds on social media. The debate was seen in multiple comments and earlier irrelevant news articles are surging.

2. Over performing/common trends in the last week:

• CrowdTangle Insights from the previous week- post related to Pfizer reportedly seeking military bases and sovereign assets as guarantee for vaccines and that it has become a terror has overperformed by 163.07 times

• PM Narendra Modi takes the first dose of Covid-19 vaccine at Delhi's AIIMS has overperformed by 101.26 times

• Ghana receives 6L doses of made-in-India COVID vaccines under the 'Vaccine Maitri' program has overperformed by 58.70 times

3. On-ground Surveys on Vaccine Hesitancy

• The study published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour on Friday, is the first to use a randomized controlled trial to quantify how misinformation can make vaccine hesitancy worse. It was concluded in the study that India also seems to have high confidence in a Covid-19 vaccine. In the analyzed data from a 32-country survey on intent to accept a vaccine and India ranked second with 90.7% (95% credible interval, 88.1 to 93.2) of respondents stating that they would “definitely” or “probably” take a vaccine. India was only behind Vietnam (96.8%)