What is it about?
Covid19 vaccine hesitancy is primarily driven by concerns about side effects and inadequate evidence about long term COVID-19 vaccine safety, efficacy and quality associated with the speedy approval. Increasing vaccine confidence in health workers is a good starting point to addressing vaccine hesitancy since health workers have been severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and the Covid-19 vaccine can protect them and subsequently an essential resource of the health system and society. Moreover, health workers are cited as the most trusted source for guidance about vaccine choices by populations. Thus, increasing trust among health workers can have the positive effect of building trust and confidence in Covid-19 vaccines for the whole population. However, in our study, 2/3rd out of the 614 healthcare workers were hesitant to COVID-19 vaccine (either delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccination despite the availability of vaccination services).
Featured Image
Photo by CDC on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Our finding is important to understand the problem and design policy and other interventions to increase vaccination uptake at any level of care for any type of vaccine.
Perspectives
Despite ours and others research is indicating the vaccine hesitance is high, more research is needed to understand what interventions work to address vaccine hesitancy, particularly regarding Covid19 vaccine hesitancy such as interventions that target health workers, interventions that employ multiple strategies, and interventions that employ educational strategies. In addition, more research is needed on social media as a way to vaccine hesitant groups since social media has played an unprecedented role in the spread of misinformation about Covid19 vaccines. Health workers typically have smart phones and are easily reachable by messages over smart phone. Social media activity is common among health workers and health workers commonly have a social media network of peers. Moreover, smart phone use are common at the work place and content is likely to be shared among health workers.
Atalay Mulu Fentie
Addis Ababa University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among Ethiopian healthcare workers, PLoS ONE, December 2021, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0261125.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
