Experts vs. policymakers in the COVID-19 policy response

The Impact of Expert Opinions in COVID-19 News Coverage on Vaccination During the Fifth Outbreak in Hong Kong: A Time Series Analysis

The role of experts in news coverage has become increasingly prominent, but the evidence regarding the effectiveness of expert opinions in affecting public behavior remains mixed. This study seeks to examine the influence of expert opinions covered in the news on the public's response to public health crises. By adopting a macro-level framing perspective, we investigated how framing consistency, a macro-level concept indicating the agreement between expert opinions in news coverage and government policies or among peer experts, evolves over time and its temporal causal relationship with public behavior. Specifically, this study collected all press news coverage in Hong Kong over four months during the fifth outbreak, including 1,416 articles with 650 expert opinions, as well as the vaccination data that paralleled with this period. We constructed time series of expert opinions and vaccination behavior, and then conducted Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models with Granger causality analysis to examine how framing consistency of expert opinions in news coverage influenced vaccination. The results indicate that the consistent framing between expert opinions and government policies increased COVID-19 vaccination during the fifth outbreak in Hong Kong, while conflicting opinions responding to government policies had no significant effect on vaccination. Opinions among medical experts on COVID-19 issues also did not significantly impact vaccination. The implications for designing communication strategies and enhancing public behavioral support during public health crises are discussed.

The efficacy of health experts' communication in inducing support for COVID-19 measures and effect on trustworthiness: A survey in Hong Kong

To control the spread of COVID-19, governments may implement freedoms-infringing health measures. Therefore, citizens' support for these measures is important. This study investigates: (1) whether health experts' communication induces support for COVID-19 measures, and (2) whether health experts' agreeing or disagreeing with government directives affects their trustworthiness. A cross-sectional online questionnaire was completed by 1072 adults in the Hong Kong general population between May 26 and June 3, 2021. Three COVID-19 measures were examined: contact-tracing mobile application, restriction-testing, and ban of public assembly. For each, participants were randomly assigned to three groups to view, respectively: vignettes with a neutral government announcement only; vignettes with a government announcement and a health expert's quote supporting the government's decision; and vignettes with a government announcement and a health expert's quote disagreeing with the government's decision. The result shows that positive health experts' communication increased the support for banning public assembly; no effects were found for the support for contact-tracing mobile applications and restriction testing. Participants who only viewed health experts disagreeing with the government had higher trust in health experts relative to participants who viewed health experts agreeing with the government at least once. The results render doubtful the strategy that health experts can be involved for garnering support for unpopular health measures without jeopardizing public trust in them.