Author Correction: Measuring the impact of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on vaccination intent in the UK and USA.

© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. In the version of this article initially published, the reference number of the ethics application approved by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine ethics committee was incorrectly quoted. The correct number is 22647. Also, debriefing information was originally only provided in Supplementary Information. The following sentence has been added for clarification to the Methods section in the updated article: “All respondents exposed to misinformation were debriefed after the survey; debriefing information can be found in the questionnaire included in Supplementary Information.” These errors have been corrected in the PDF and HTML versions of this article

Measuring the impact of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on vaccination intent in the UK and USA.

Widespread acceptance of a vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) will be the next major step in fighting the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, but achieving high uptake will be a challenge and may be impeded by online misinformation. To inform successful vaccination campaigns, we conducted a randomized controlled trial in the UK and the USA to quantify how exposure to online misinformation around COVID-19 vaccines affects intent to vaccinate to protect oneself or others. Here we show that in both countries-as of September 2020-fewer people would 'definitely' take a vaccine than is likely required for herd immunity, and that, relative to factual information, recent misinformation induced a decline in intent of 6.2 percentage points (95th percentile interval 3.9 to 8.5) in the UK and 6.4 percentage points (95th percentile interval 4.0 to 8.8) in the USA among those who stated that they would definitely accept a vaccine. We also find that some sociodemographic groups are differentially impacted by exposure to misinformation. Finally, we show that scientific-sounding misinformation is more strongly associated with declines in vaccination intent

FcMBL magnetic bead-based MALDI-TOF MS rapidly identifies paediatric blood stream infections from positive blood cultures

Rapid identification of potentially life-threatening blood stream infections (BSI) improves clinical outcomes, yet conventional blood culture (BC) identification methods require ~24-72 hours of liquid culture, plus 24-48 hours to generate single colonies on solid media suitable for identification by mass spectrometry (MS). Newer rapid centrifugation techniques, such as the Bruker MBT-Sepsityper® IVD, replace culturing on solid media and expedite the diagnosis of BCs but frequently demonstrate reduced sensitivity for identifying clinically significant Gram-positive bacterial or fungal infections. This study introduces a protocol that utilises the broad-range binding properties of an engineered version of mannose-binding lectin linked to the Fc portion of immunoglobulin (FcMBL) to capture and enrich pathogens combined with matrix-assisted laser desorption-ionisation time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) MS for enhanced infection identification in BCs. The FcMBL method identified 94.1% (64 of 68) of clinical BCs processed, with a high sensitivity for both Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria (94.7 and 93.2%, respectively). The FcMBL method identified more patient positive BCs than the Sepsityper® (25 of 25 vs 17 of 25), notably with 100% (3/3) sensitivity for clinical candidemia, compared to only 33% (1/3) for the Sepsityper®. Additionally, during inoculation experiments, the FcMBL method demonstrated a greater sensitivity, identifying 100% (24/24) of candida to genus level and 9/24 (37.5%) top species level compared to 70.8% (17/24) to genus and 6/24 to species (25%) using the Sepsityper®. This study demonstrates that capture and enrichment of samples using magnetic FcMBL-conjugated beads is superior to rapid centrifugation methods for identification of BCs by MALDI-TOF MS. Deploying the FcMBL method therefore offers potential clinical benefits in sensitivity and reduced turnaround times for BC diagnosis compared to the standard Sepsityper® kit, especially for fungal diagnosis

Comparison of the FcMBL and Sepsityper^® protocols.

Time to identification is ~7 minutes for the full Sepsityper® workflow compared to ~9 minutes for the FcMBL protocol.</p

Bruker Biotyper log score comparison of the Sepsityper^<i>®</i> and FcMBL methods for the detection of pathogens in positive clinical blood culture samples.

Bold Log scores indicate the higher score of the two methods.</p

Heatmap of spectral similarities with dendrogram clustering analysis for FcMBL candida mass spectra (2,500–7,400m/z).

Heatmap of spectral similarities with dendrogram clustering analysis for FcMBL candida mass spectra (2,500–7,400m/z).</p

MALDI-TOF MS identification of paediatric samples using FcMBL beads.

Seven patients had both an anaerobic and aerobic bottle processed if available, accounting for the higher number of FcMBL positive samples seen for some species.</p

Extreme enrichment of <i>E</i>. <i>coli</i> from spiked blood samples compared to centrifuged samples.

E. coli specific peaks are found in all concentrations using the FcMBL method. The limit of detection for the centrifuged samples was found to be at 106 CFU/ml.</p

Comparison of Bruker Biotyper log scores between the Sepsityper^® and FcMBL rapid identification methods for fungemia.

Log scores highlighted in red indicate scores below identification confidence. Bold log scores indicate the higher score of the two methods.</p

Overview of clinical microbiology SOP.

Overview of clinical microbiology SOP.</p