Relationship of people’s sources of health information and political ideology with acceptance of conspiratorial beliefs about vaccines

•Use of social media health information relates to vaccine conspiracy beliefs.•Political conservatives are more likely to believe vaccine conspiracies.•Reliance on providers for health information may protect from conspiracy beliefs. Conspiracies about vaccination are prevalent. We assessed how the health information sources people rely upon and their political ideologies are associated with acceptance of vaccine conspiracies. Online survey (N = 599) on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsource platform. Hypotheses were tested via structural equation modeling. Acceptance of vaccine conspiracy beliefs was associated positively with greater reliance on social media for health information (coef. = 0.42, p