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Vaccine hesitancy was an ongoing issue during the COVID-19 pandemic. We recruited 620 adults for an online questionnaire to assess the influence of various factors on vaccine hesitancy. Five pre-existing scales were used to measure vaccine knowledge, attitudes to doctors and medicine, vaccine conspiracy belief, perception of COVID-19 as a threat, and vaccine hesitancy. We found that low vaccine knowledge was the strongest predictor for hesitancy. We also collected information about age, gender and vaccine status (fully vaccinated, with or without booster, partially vaccinated, not vaccinated). There were no age or gender effects, but we found significant trends between vaccination status and knowledge, attitudes, conspiracy belief, and hesitancy.
Since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic (Cucionotta & Vanelli, 2020), there has been success in developing effective vaccines and distributing them around the world (World Health Organization, 2022). However, a significant number of people are not vaccinated (Buscemi et al., 2023, Gravelle et al., 2022). Research has shown that vaccine hesitancy is responsible for the refusal and delay in acceptance of vaccines - and it is "on a continuum between those who accept all vaccines with no doubts, to complete refusal with no doubts, with vaccine hesitant individuals the heterogenous group between these two extremes" (MacDonald et al., 2015, pp. 4161-4162). There are many potential causes that feed into vaccine hesitancy (Cooper et al., 2021; Dubé at al., 2014; Larson et al., 2014; MacDonald et al., 2015). Here, we focus on four predictive factors: vaccine knowledge, attitudes to doctors and medicine, vaccine conspiracy belief, and perception of COVID-19 as a threat. Note that none of our chosen factors relate to an individual's inherent personality, which is justifiable given that previous studies have found no influence of personality traits (e.g. Bogg et al., 2023).
On the first factor, vaccine knowledge, research has shown that both knowledge and misconceptions play a significant role in vaccine hesitancy (Gust et al., 2005; Luthy et al., 2012). Research by Zingg and Siegrist (2012) revealed that misconceptions about vaccines in society are common and individuals level of knowledge about vaccines affects their decisions to vaccinate themselves and their children. A more recent study (Abebe et al., 2021) concluded good knowledge on CO VID-19 to be a determinate factor for accepting a...