STREAM Research Group, Division of Ethics and Policy, School of Population and Global Health, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, Dept. of Pediatrics, The Montreal Children's Hospital, McGill University Health Centre, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
PLoS One. 2022 Feb 15;17(2):e0262740. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0262740. eCollection 2022.
Compare lay expectations of medical development to those of experts in the context of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development.
A short online survey of experts and lay people measuring when participants believe important vaccine milestones would occur and how likely potential setbacks were. Samples of US and Canadian lay people recruited through Qualtrics. The expert sample was created through a contact network in vaccine development and supplemented with corresponding authors of recent scholarly review articles on vaccine development.
In aggregate, lay people gave responses that were within 3 months of experts, tending to be later than experts for early milestones and earlier for later milestones. Median lay best estimates for when a vaccine would be available to the public were 08/2021 and 09/2021 for the US and Canadian samples, compared with 09-10/2021 for the experts. However, many individual lay responses showed more substantial disagreement with expert opinions, with 54% of lay best estimates of when a vaccine would be available to the public being before the median expert soonest estimate or after the median expert latest estimate. Lay people were much more pessimistic about vaccine development encountering setbacks than experts (median probability 59% of boxed warning compared with only 30% for experts). Misalignment between layperson and expert expectations was not explained by any demographic variables collected in our survey.
Median lay expectations were generally similar to experts. At the individual level, however, lay people showed substantial variation with many believing milestones would occur much sooner than experts. Lay people were in general much more pessimistic about the prospect of setbacks than were experts.
在 SARS-CoV-2 疫苗开发的背景下，比较公众对医学发展的预期与专家的预期。
通过在线短问卷对专家和公众进行调查，测量参与者认为重要疫苗里程碑事件何时发生以及潜在挫折的可能性有多大。美国和加拿大公众样本通过 Qualtrics 招募。专家样本是通过疫苗开发的联系网络创建的，并补充了最近关于疫苗开发的学术综述文章的通讯作者。
总体而言，公众的反应与专家相差不超过 3 个月，在早期里程碑事件上倾向于比专家晚，在后期里程碑事件上倾向于比专家早。美国和加拿大样本中公众对疫苗何时可向公众提供的最佳估计中位数为 2021 年 8 月和 9 月，而专家的中位数为 2021 年 9 月至 10 月。然而，许多个体公众的反应与专家意见存在较大分歧，有 54%的公众对疫苗何时可向公众提供的最佳估计中位数早于专家的最快估计中位数或晚于专家的最晚估计中位数。公众对疫苗开发遇到挫折的悲观程度远高于专家（公众认为出现黑框警告的中位数概率为 59%，而专家为 30%）。我们调查中收集的任何人口统计学变量都不能解释公众和专家期望之间的不一致。
公众的中位数预期通常与专家相似。然而，在个体层面上，公众表现出很大的差异，许多人认为里程碑事件会比专家早得多发生。一般来说，公众对挫折的可能性比专家更为悲观。
