Appealing to Americans' altruism is not enough to nudge them to accept novel vaccines.

This article examines whether framing COVID-19 vaccination decisions in terms of altruism influences vaccine acceptance among U.S. adults. Using a randomized discrete choice experiment with 1,674 Amazon Mechanical Turk participants, the study found that altruistic framing and individuals’ self-reported altruism scores did not significantly affect vaccination acceptance. Instead, vaccine uptake was primarily driven by vaccine attributes such as efficacy, safety, dosing schedule, and individual factors including prior flu vaccination, belief in vaccine safety and efficacy, and support for vaccine mandates. The authors note limitations related to sample representativeness and the difference between stated and actual behaviors, concluding that promoting altruism alone may be insufficient to increase novel vaccine uptake in the U.S. context.