14 Jan Fluent & Critica’s Vaccine Hesitancy Research Published in Frontiers in Public Health
Fluent Research’s Founder & President Nellie Gregorian and Executive Director William Sandy have collaborated with Critica on an article published this week in the Frontiers in Public Health Journal.
Titled, “Implications of COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy: Results of Online Bulletin Board Interviews,” the article details the results from focus groups, or “bulletin boards,” carried out to discover the nature of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and its implications.
The article was also written by Jack M. Gorman and Sara E. Gorman from Critica Inc, and David A. Scales, M.D., Ph.D. from the Department of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College.
You can read an excerpt below or check out the full article here.
Introduction:
The introduction of safe and effective vaccines that protect against the virus that causes COVID-19 has the potential to bring the pandemic under control. Unfortunately, a substantial minority of Americans are either hesitant to be vaccinated or say they will absolutely not receive one of the vaccines under any circumstances (1). Vaccine hesitancy and refusal threaten the ability to establish community (also called “herd”) immunity and therefore pose a significant risk to the public’s health (2).
Vaccine hesitancy and refusal are complex phenomena involving multiple themes and narratives (3–5). These phenomena vary by ethnic and racial groups, geographic areas, political affiliations, and a host of other demographic and cultural factors (6–12). Vaccine hesitancy and refusal have been fueled in part by misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19 that has been spread throughout traditional and social media (13–15). Misinformation about vaccines is particularly difficult to dislodge (15–17).
While survey data have provided important information about the reasons for vaccine hesitancy, direct interviews and focus groups offer the potential to reveal more nuanced factors and to place vaccine hesitancy within a larger socio-ecological context. Among the reasons cited for vaccine hesitancy in one recent focus group study are concerns with the rapid development of the vaccine and fears about long-term adverse side effects (18). The same research group found that Black focus group participants also cited mistrust of the healthcare system and racial injustice as reasons for vaccine hesitancy (18).
In the present work we conducted online focus groups, or bulletin boards, in an attempt to probe more deeply into why people are skeptical about COVID-19 vaccines. Efforts to persuade people to accept vaccination are more successful among those who are hesitant to be vaccinated but not yet fully decided against vaccination (19). One recent study did find that people who were “strongly hesitant” about vaccinations against COVID-19 could be persuaded by messages that “highlighted the personal benefits of vaccinations or directly addressed speed of developmental concerns” (20). We used an initial screener to select participants who were hesitant to receive a COVID-19 vaccine but not yet firmly decided for or against having one. Our analysis of the results was influenced by the social ecological model (21). The information gleaned from these interviews revealed several themes that we believe are important not only to understanding COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and refusal but also to larger issues facing the U.S. healthcare system.