Optimizing HPV Vaccine Introduction in Shanghai, China

Within low, middle, and upper income countries, low vaccine coverage results from both obstacles to vaccine access and low confidence in vaccine programs. Thus, it is critical to determine how best to enhance trust in vaccines as increasing numbers of vaccines are recommended for use. Even though the context accompanying the initial roll-out of a vaccine can have a large impact on people's perceptions of the vaccine and the corresponding disease, it is not clear how to best introduce a vaccine to increase public confidence and enhance uptake. The US roll-out of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine framed HPV as a sexually transmitted infection, which proved to be an impediment to efforts to increase vaccine uptake >10 years after its introduction. This study will use an educational experiment, where parents of children will be exposed to information about the HPV vaccination in different ways. Parents will be introduced to the HPV vaccine through different scenarios with varying emphases (i.e., age at vaccination, types of transmission, type of cancer prevention). The aim will be to determine how the framing of the HPV vaccination across several dimensions affects short-term willingness to receive it.