Charlotte McDonald

Hence, the headline that more Americans doubt vaccine safety than trust it.

But David is not convinced.

I mean, questions one and three are pretty close, but you get the picture.

These overlapping questions make it very hard to know exactly which part of the question is driving the answer.

The point here is the article headline makes a specific claim about vaccine safety, seemingly on the basis of this question, but it's very hard to know which part of it is driving that response.

Is it concerns about vaccine safety or vaccine science or the enforcement of vaccine uptake or personal freedom?

One more thing to consider is some of these questions, it's not clear which vaccines we're talking about.

Politico put a link to the full survey data in their article.

The strange thing is that the survey also asked a question which seems to more directly test people's opinions on vaccine safety.

If you categorise both groups as trusting vaccine safety, which isn't much of a leap, it puts 63% of Americans in that group, a clear majority.

And just 10% of respondents took this option.

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, David isn't sure about this question either.

These questions also have a lot of moving parts.

And again, the actual vaccine involved is unclear.

So it's hard to know what's driving the answers.

We asked Politico whether they could justify the headline on their article, and a day later, they changed it.

I don't think anyone can disagree with that.

They added a note to the article saying the previous headline was an editing error.

Let's just hope all the people who saw the headline and post about it on social media got the memo.

Thanks to Dr David Higgins.