A COVID vaccine is the safest way to reduce the chances of SARS-CoV-2 hospitalizing you and is a key component of the public health campaign against the pandemic. There is a lot of controversy and outright anger about it, and it appears that a significant portion of the population avoids vaccination for political reasons.
With the extreme polarization of U.S. politics unresolved and the controversy seemingly fresh on the minds of some politicians, it’s easy to see that vaccine hesitancy will not go away. . However, an international survey of COVID vaccine attitudes suggests that the United States has significantly boosted its acceptance of COVID vaccines and now has an attitude similar to that of other Westernized democracies. Elsewhere, the survey reveals clear regional patterns in vaccine acceptance, albeit with oddities everywhere.
become typical
The survey began in 2020 as a series of questions about whether people intend to get the vaccine once it becomes available. In the meantime, those who conducted the survey added several countries (currently up to 23 countries) and asked questions to account for vaccine availability, additional boosters, and the development of treatments for COVID-19. it changed. In all 23 countries, the survey included his 1,000 participants, which generally reflects the population of that country.
The survey focuses on what is called vaccine hesitancy, which defines unvaccination or unwillingness to get a vaccine when it is available. Questions about boosters had the same format, but were specific to those who had already been vaccinated.
Overall, the news is good. Globally, average vaccine hesitation declined with each survey edition and is now just above 20%. Just under 20% indicate that they have not suffered an initial attack, which is similar to the current situation in the US. (This appears to be similar to the percentage receiving at least one injection calculated from CDC data.)
This also makes the US fairly typical of Westernized democracy peer groups that tend to be in the 15-20% vaccine hesitation range. , Sweden and Germany above 20%, with interest rates rising as we move east through Europe. Poland has the most hesitant rate among European democracies at 36%, probably due to the influence of neighboring Russia, where hesitance is nearly 40%. The United States is typical of this group, mainly because there was about a 20% increase in people who reported having been vaccinated in the last year alone.
There is no clear pattern when it comes to boosters. In France, where vaccine hesitation was less than 20%, booster hesitation was over 25%, and in Germany booster hesitation was only 11%. So while local factors seem to matter most here, it’s clear that we can’t expect messages that worked in vaccines to automatically carry over to boosters.
straddling the earth
The rest of the globe is sparsely represented by comparison, with the countries included highlighting mostly the exceptions. %, but just north of that in Mexico, the hesitation rate was more than double at over 26%. Acceptance rates are very high in East and South Asia (from 11% in South Korea to less than 2% in India) and much lower in African countries, with near 30% hesitation in Nigeria being the best result.
Notably, vaccine acceptance has fallen by 20% in South Africa (the largest in the survey), with more than half of the population expressing hesitance. South Korea is also an exception, with 27% of her participants reporting hesitation about boosters despite high vaccine acceptance rates, second only to Russia.
It is important to note that in many countries with low GDP, people are answering questions without having the option of being vaccinated. More equitable access to vaccines could enable more people in these countries to get vaccinated despite their hesitation. Other studies have identified vaccine misinformation, low education standards, and distrust of science and government as deterrent factors.
Medical education appears to be particularly effective in promoting vaccine uptake, with only 4.6% of those employed as health workers saying they are hesitant.
Parental willingness to get their children vaccinated is also on the rise, along with friendliness. It went up slightly globally and is now around 70%.
