In this report, we use survey data collected in April 2021 to document and understand how people in eight countries (Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Spain, the UK, and the US) accessed news and information about COVID-19 more than a year into the global pandemic. We examine how they rate the trustworthiness of the different sources and platforms they rely on, how much misinformation they say they encounter, and how they see vaccines.

For six of the countries (where we have comparable data from April 2020), we track changes over the last year.

We find that: • In almost all countries, news organisations are the single most widely used source of information about coronavirus. Furthermore, news organisations have become even more central to how people stay informed about coronavirus in the last year because, while overall reach has declined compared to earlier in the pandemic, the reach of other sources has declined more.

• While important and widely used, news organisations in most countries reach significantly fewer of the younger 18–24-year-olds, and in most countries reach significantly fewer people with low or medium levels of education than those with a university degree, underlining challenges around information inequality.

• Some of the ‘rally around the flag’ effect seen earlier in the crisis is dissipating, but not equally so for all institutions. Trust in news organisations has declined by an average of eight percentage points (pp), but trust in national government has declined by an average of 13pp.

• In most countries covered, national health authorities, global health authorities, and scientists, doctors, or other health experts, remain highly and broadly trusted, though this trust has declined somewhat too, especially in Argentina and the United States.

• The trust gap between coronavirus information from news organisations and information on different kinds of platforms remains pronounced. On average, the gap between news organisations and social media is 21pp, between news and video sites 22pp, and between news and messaging applications 28pp. The gap is six points on average between news and search engines, but in Japan the gap is not statistically significant, and in Argentina and Brazil search engines are trusted more for news and information about COVID-19.

• In terms of sources of false or misleading information about COVID-19, public concern is centred on political actors first and foremost. On average, 35% of respondents across the eight countries say they think they have seen a lot or a great deal of false or misleading information from individual politicians.

• In terms of platforms, public concern over false or misleading information about COVID-19 is centred on social media. On average, 30% say they think they have seen ‘a lot’ or ‘a great deal’ of false or misleading information about coronavirus on social media.

• Encouragingly, belief in misinformation about coronavirus vaccines is very low across all countries. In most, more than 90% of those that we have surveyed do not believe any of the five false claims we included in the survey, even if they may have come across them.