PONE-D-21-22345

Intention to Obtain a COVID-19 Vaccine Among Brazilian Immigrant Women in the U.S.: Results from a Nationwide Survey

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Allen,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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ACADEMIC EDITOR: Considering my own reading and the lone reviewer opinion, I will recommending a major revision for this paper. 

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Please submit your revised manuscript by Dec 09 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Srinivas Goli, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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“Funding for this study was provided to JA in part by a grant from the Tisch College Community Research Center (https://tischcollege.tufts.edu/research/tcrc). Additional funding was provided by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health, Award Number UL1TR002544 (https://ncats.nih.gov/). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”

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Additional Editor Comments:

Considering my own reading and the lone reviewer opinion, I will recommending a major revision for this paper.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: On data sharing question/policy: In one place the authors say the data are publicly available, in the other, they say data are not available (see last point in my reviewer comments).

Other comments for the authors:

This cross-sectional national online survey of Brazilian women describes attitudes and intentions towards acceptability of a COVID-19 vaccine. While the survey was conducted prior to the emergency approval of the current vaccines, many of the findings may still be useful as the pandemic continues to surge in the face of ongoing vaccine hesitancy. The sample is not representative, but still may provide insights into immigrant attitudes towards the vaccines. However, the paper could be strengthened by addressing the following points, should the authors choose to revise the manuscript.

• Given the timing of this survey in the context of fast-changing epidemic conditions, I suggest including the dates of the survey in the abstract so readers know right away the referent period for the study.

• In the background, some ambiguity exists between the terms “Brazilians” and “immigrant Brazilians.” For example, The authors state there are over 450,000 Brazilian in the US according to Census (L 66). If this is based on the race question, then that may not mean all of these are immigrants. Could the authors clarify? And could they be consistent in use of terms throughout?

• Relatedly, Table 1 indicates 11 respondents were born in the US. These cases should be removed from all analyses.

• Eligibility includes Brazilian women who resided in the US. How did the researchers determine immigrant status?

• Most online surveys offering compensation are the target of fraudsters attempting to access the compensation by providing false information. What safeguards were in place to ensure such attempts were blocked?

• Since vaccine hesitancy appears to follow certain geographic boundaries, it may be useful to include geography in the multivariate analysis.

• A number of questions arose based on the results/Table 2:

o The selection for the final models is purely empirically driven, not theoretically driven (L 148). Yet it appears the Health Belief Model (or perhaps a related framing) underlies the selection of questions, analysis, and discussion. Are there conceptual framings that may better inform the final models besides just empirical bivariate results?

o The selection of demographic characteristics in Model 1 is confusing. None of them were significantly related to vaccine intentions (Table 1), but somehow the authors landed on Age, marital status and income to include. Why?

o Table 2 says that n=364, same as Table 1. However, n=42 cases were missing in the “Trusted Source” variable. What happened to these cases in Model 2? If they were dropped from Model 2, then those same cases should be dropped from Model 1 – otherwise there may be systematic differences in the two samples driving results. Other strategies include imputing missing cases (in general, a better option than dropping cases), or treating them as another category of the variable (similar to what was done for income).

o The interpretation of “Trusted Source” appears to be somewhat off. Although not explicit on the table (and it should be), the referent category for the variable is “Health care provider.” The results, thus, are relative to that category, so that public agencies as the most trusted news source are not significantly different from health care providers for vaccine intention. This interpretation changes the discussion and conclusions. Note – the results themselves may change once the missing data in this variable are appropriate accommodated.

• Finally, the statements about data sharing appear to be in conflict. On the front material, the statement reads data cannot be shared publicly. In the backend topics, the authors declare that data are available on request. Which is it?

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Reviewer #1: No

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PONE-D-21-22345R1Intention to obtain a COVID-19 vaccine among Brazilian immigrant women in the U.S.PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Allen,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

The reviewer from the previous round has reassessed the manuscript. They are overall happy with the amendments made, and have provided some additional suggestions to strengthen the manuscript, which we wanted to give you the opportunity to consider.

When you resubmit, please also provide the IRB approval number for the study in the Methods section.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 22 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Hanna Landenmark

Staff Editor

PLOS ONE

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Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

********** 

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

********** 

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors have been responsive to comments, and the paper is improved. I have only three comments:

1. On line 277, the word should be regarding, not regrading

2. On Table 2, the Time in US variable is a bit puzzling. The referent is 0-4 years, but no other category appears for that variable in the table, as one would expect given the categorization of the variable in Table 1. Was this variable dichotomized in the multivariate analysis? Or are the other categories missing from the table? Or was this variable used as a continuous variable, and the reference notation a mistake?

3. The authors describe the HBM as a guiding frame in the Methods, but do not return to it in the Discussion. Assessing the usefulness (or not) of the model for this investigation would be an important theoretical contribution.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

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[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Intention to obtain a COVID-19 vaccine among Brazilian immigrant women in the U.S.

PONE-D-21-22345R2

Dear Dr. Allen,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

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Kind regards,

Carol E. Kaufman

Guest Editor and Prior reviewer for this manuscript

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: