It is one of the greatest achievements of modern science. within only one year of SARS-CoV-2 (Coronavirus that causes COVID-19) is being identified, safe and effective vaccines developed, tested and started rolling out. Since the first doses were given almost two years ago, they are estimated to have saved millions of lives.
And yet even before their development was complete, COVID vaccines attracted considerable opposition. While vaccine hesitation is not a new phenomenon, covid vaccine It was met with particularly intense hostility between conspiracy theorists and other anti-Semitic people.
Meanwhile, the rapid development and approval of vaccines gave way to a new group of vaccine skeptics. These people do not consider themselves “anti-vaxxers”, and do not necessarily oppose other vaccinations, but they were concerned at the speed at which COVID vaccines were tested and approved.
This raises the question whether public confidence in vaccines has waned since the introduction of vaccines, despite the undeniable success of COVID vaccination campaigns. Epidemic,
My students and I tried to answer this question in our recently published study, in which we compared pre-pandemic vaccines and the rollout of COVID vaccines.
We compared the results of two online surveys conducted in November 2019 and January 2022, which included more than 1,000 adults. Survey responses showed that confidence in vaccination in the post-pandemic group was significantly lower than in the pre-pandemic group.
A decline in vaccine confidence was observed regardless of participants’ age, gender, religious belief, education, and ethnicity.
A notable difference between the two surveys was that while middle-aged participants in the pre-pandemic group had significantly more vaccines-Undecided Compared to its younger peers, this was not the case for the 2022 group.
This observation may be partly explained by the fact that COVID is known to cause more severe disease in older patients, whereas it does not typically lead to hospitalization and death in younger people. So it is conceivable that older people felt more motivated to get their wallets, and more appreciated the security it was provided to them.
In both 2019 and 2022, participants with religious beliefs were significantly more vaccine-hesitating than atheists and agnostics. Meanwhile, respondents from black and Asian backgrounds were more hesitant than those of white ethnicity. There was no association between gender and vaccine confidence in any of the surveys.
Providing useful information about how the pandemic affected public view vaccination, there are limitations of this study. When we conducted the first survey in 2019, we could not expect the pandemic to break out only a few months later. So the study was not originally designed to follow participants’ opinions over time (called a longitudinal study).
Instead, we used similar methods to recruit a second group of participants for the 2022 survey, and asked them the same questions so that we could compare results (a cross-sectional study). Consequently, our findings should be interpreted with caution, as they do not reflect the changing opinions of the same group of people over time, but rather provide snapshots of two comparable groups at two different moments in time.
However, we added a question to the 2022 survey asking participants to report their change in vaccine confidence covid, Nearly one in four said their faith in vaccines has waned since the pandemic.
How can we rebuild trust in a falling vaccine? Our study is in line with other research suggesting that vaccine belief may be yet another victim of covid pandemic,
Fostering faith in vaccines is vital to helping us fight infectious diseases that already exist among us as well as new ones that may emerge in the future. So how can we tackle this challenge? Reassuring the public about the safety of vaccines is a key element. However, like all drugs, they carry a very low risk of serious side effects, these risks are very small compared to the harm caused by the diseases they protect against.
For example, in the case of COVID, many people are hesitant to get vaccinated because they are concerned about the rare side effect of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle). However, abundant clinical evidence indicates that there is a very high risk of a COVID infection myocarditis Compared to getting vaccinated – more than seven times.
Confidence in vaccination can be fostered by ensuring clear communication with governments and public health services and promoting science literacy at all levels. This should happen in schools, but also in adults, especially those with caregiving responsibilities such as parents, caregivers and healthcare workers.
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