Yaffa Shir-Raz's research while affiliated with University of Haifa and other places

Publications (17)

Article
Full-text available
T he controversy over vaccines has persisted since their introduction in the eighteenth century. While many studies have addressed the concerns and motivations of the general population regarding hesitation and resistance to vaccination (especially parents, concerning routine childhood immunization), the present study was designed to examine this i...
Article
Full-text available
The emergence of COVID-19 has led to numerous controversies over COVID-related knowledge and policy. To counter the perceived threat from doctors and scientists who challenge the official position of governmental and intergovernmental health authorities, some supporters of this orthodoxy have moved to censor those who promote dissenting views. The...
Article
Full-text available
The controversy over vaccines has recently intensified in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, with calls from politicians, health professionals, journalists, and citizens to take harsh measures against so-called “anti-vaxxers,” while accusing them of spreading “fake news” and as such, of endangering public health. However, the issue of suppre...
Article
Full-text available
The controversy over vaccines, which has recently intensified following the COVID-19 pandemic, provokes heated debates, with both advocates and opponents raising allegations of bias and fraud in research. Researchers whose work raises doubts about the safety of certain vaccines claim to be victims of discriminatory treatment aimed at suppressing di...
Article
In most Western countries, where direct advertising of prescription drugs (DTCA) is banned, the pharma industry relies primarily on PR activities to promote its products. Despite the pharma industry's ever-increasing share in framing media coverage of health issues, the strategies used in its press materials have not yet been systematically examine...
Article
Studies indicate uncertainty surrounding vaccination safety and efficacy for pregnant women, causing a central problem for health authorities. In this study, approximately 26% of participants do not recommend the tetanus, diphtheria, and acellular pertussis and influenza vaccines to their patients, although being aware of the health ministry recomm...
Article
Background: Vaccine compliance has long been a cause for concern for health authorities throughout the world. However very little effort has been made to examine parental discourse during the decision-making process. Methods: An online survey was conducted (N = 437) to examine predictors of parents' attitudes regarding childhood vaccination. Re...
Book
In a digital world where the public’s voice is growing increasingly strong, how can health experts best exert influence to contain the global spread of infectious diseases? Digital media sites provide an important source of health information, however are also powerful platforms for the public to air personal experiences and concerns. This has led...
Article
Water fluoridation is a controversial issue in public health. Despite the uncertainty regarding its efficacy and safety, health officials continue to communicate it as 'unequivocally' safe and effective. Our focus is on how health officials and policy-makers in Israel frame the issue of water fluoridation in terms of certainty while promoting a man...
Article
The current research focuses on the 2013 polio outbreak in Israel as a case study to analyze the sources of information used in new media platforms, examining whether the new media have changed the ways in which we communicate about health issues. Specifically, we tracked and coded polio-related references on Hebrew news websites, blogs, forums, an...
Article
Objective: Our aim was to examine in what terms leading newspapers' online sites described the current Ebola crisis. Methods: We employed a quantitative content analysis of terms attributed to Ebola. We found and analyzed 582 articles published between March 23 and September 30, 2014, on the online websites of 3 newspapers: The New York Times, D...
Article
This study focuses on newspaper coverage of the Hickox quarantine incident, using it as a case study to examine how the media characterized the spread of disease in an ongoing crisis situation characterized by uncertainty. The study builds on Slovic et al.’s research, who argue that risk perception is comprised of both emotional and analytical aspe...
Article
Recent years have seen advances in theories and models of risk and crisis communication, with a focus on emerging epidemic infection. Nevertheless, information flow remains unilateral in many countries and does not take into account the public's polyvocality and the fact that its opinions and knowledge often "compete" with those of health authoriti...
Article
This study addresses the issue of valence framing effect in the context of immunization, a preventive behavior often addressed by the equation of benefit versus risk. The authors examined how framing (support vs. oppose) the issue of HPV vaccination in Israel’s immunization routine affects attitudes regarding vaccine regulations. The study also exa...
Article
The unexpected developments surrounding the Ebola virus in the United States provide yet another warning that we need to establish communication preparedness. This study examines what the Israeli public knew about Ebola after the initial stages of the outbreak in a country to which Ebola has not spread and assesses the association between knowledge...
Article
This study examines vaccination hesitancy or refusal following the 2013 polio outbreak in Israel, based on two theoretical models. The first is Sandman’s theoretical model, which holds that risk perception is comprised of hazard plus outrage. The second model is the affect heuristic that explains the risk/benefit confounding. It aims to expose the...

Citations

... 17 Sledeći ovu preporuku, pojedine države su u jednom periodu proglasile obaveznu vakcinaciju protiv COVID-19 za sve građane (Austrija, Tadžikistan, Turkmenistan, Mikronezija, Indonezija, Ekvador), odnosno za starije osobe (Italija, Grčka i Malezija) ili za maloletna lica (Kostarika) (Buchholz, 2022). 18 U mnogim drugim državama ova obaveza je uvedena za zdravstvene radnike (Stokel-Walker, 2021;Elisha et al., 2022) i/ili određene druge profesije koje zahtevaju visok nivo kontakta sa ljudima (Rothstein, Parmet and Rubinstein Reiss, 2021). Pojedine države zvanično nisu proglasile ovakvu obavezu, no usvojile su toliko stroge mere da su time de facto primorale neodlučne da se vakcinišu (npr. ...
... In particular, in October 2020, several prominent epidemiologists proposed that alternative strategies should be developed to provide 'focused protection' to those at the greatest risk [37], e.g., the elderly and those with comorbidities who are at greater risk of severe disease outcomes, including hospitalisation, critical illness, and death [4], with the intention to let those at lesser risk achieve 'herd immunity' through infection [37]. However, this recommendation was dismissed as "a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence" [36] and it later transpired was actively suppressed by prominent scientists involved in government advisory roles [38]. Instead, most continued with the original 'multipronged population-level strategies' [36]. ...
... Vaccines are given to large population of healthy individuals; therefore, constant safety surveillance is a priority. Open debate on vaccine untoward reactions should not be taken as an anti-vaccine crusade (64). ...
... While the history of immunization abounds with heroic stories about the eradication of many infectious diseases, it also presents evidence of unethical and sometimes immoral experiments , biases, conflict of interests and even scams in clinical trials of vaccines (e.g., Doshi, 2013;Cernic, 2018;Holland, Rosenberg, Iorio, 2018;Jorgensen et al., 2018;Gøtzsche, 2020). Nevertheless, physicians and researchers who point to safety issues with vaccines are often subjected to personal and professional attacks and negatively labelled as "vaccine opponents" or "anti-vaxxers" (Martin, 2015;Vernon, 2017;Elisha et al., 2021). ...
... In academic and practitioner debates about disinformation and fake news 1 , the main actors are generally cast as shadowy individuals or organisations, working to unseat democracy and outside the spectrum of ethically acceptable communication. This obscures the fact that 'organised lying' -the intentional, systemic dissemination of falsehoods by groups, organisations and institutions -has long been part of political life (Arendt, 1968), and the tools used to create and promote disinformation come directly from the mainstream stable of promotional tactics, dating back to the days of propaganda and public opinion manipulation (Bernays, 2005(Bernays, [1928 ;Corner, 2007;Demetrious, 2019;Mayhew, 1997;Ong ORGANISED LYING AND PUBLIC RELATIONS LEGITIMACY 2 and Cabanes, 2018;Shir-Raz and Avraham, 2017). Lobbying and political communication have faced significant public and academic criticism (see, e.g. ...
... In countries where the model of prenatal care is shared between multiple professionals, a lack of clarity around vaccine roles was frequently identified. A study of 870 providers in Israel identified a lack of clarity in vaccine roles when multiple professionals were involved, lack of ability to store vaccines on site, and lack of time as the three most important barriers to vaccination during pregnancy (Gesser-Edelsburg et al., 2017). Similarly, a qualitative study in Australia identified lack of clarity in vaccine roles, and the need to refer women to their GP to be vaccinated as important barriers to maternal immunization (Webb et al., 2014). ...
... Parents may refuse vaccination due to psychological problems, distrust of the vaccine, political reasons and social decisions (Berry et al., 2017). Parents who are hesitant about vaccination are also increasing day by day (Gesser-Edelsburg et al., 2017). When the literature is examined, it is seen that many studies have been conducted on vaccine hesitancy, but there are very few studies examining the relationship between vaccine hesitancy and health literacy (Brown et al., 2018;Ready, 2018;Yuksel and Topuzoglu, 2019). ...
... With this, it becomes possible to communicate directly with the public without negotiating with the media, mainly through the Internet. But according to Gesser-Edelsburg and Shir-Raz (2016) the media continue to have a critical role in risk identification and management. ...
... This conceptual complexity characterises a heterogeneous multidisciplinary research situation: While there is a vast amount of linguistic literature on relevant individual linguistic phenomena (see below), we find studies dealing with how uncertainty is verbalised as a sensation, circumstance or social condition mainly in the fields of psychology (Teigen, 1988;Juanchich et al., 2017) and science communication (Gesser-Edelsburg & Shir-Raz, 2018). On the one hand, this research is interested in the extent to which certain formulations are perceived as more or less uncertain. ...
... To access Facebook data, three studies (5%) used a third-party commercial infomediary, which resells Facebook and other social media data Gesser-Edelsburg et al., 2017;Huesch et al., 2017). One study worked directly with Facebook to both access aggregate data and coauthor the study ; the other 57 (93%) studies accessed the data from the Facebook platform. ...