No abstract

As Covid-19 spreads across the world, governments turn a hopeful eye towards research and development of a vaccine against this new disease. But it is one thing to make a vaccine available, and it is quite another to convince the public to take the shot, as the precedent of the 2009 H1N1 flu illustrated. In this paper, we present the results of four online surveys conducted in April 2020 in representative samples of the French population 18 years of age and over (N=5,018). These surveys were conducted during a period when the French population was on lockdown and the daily number of deaths attributed to the virus reached its peak. We found that if a vaccine against the new coronavirus became available, almost a quarter of respondents would not use it. We also found that attitudes to this vaccine were correlated significantly with political partisanship and engagement with the political system. Attitudes towards this future vaccine did not follow the traditional mapping of political attitudes along a Left-Right axis but oppose people who feel close to governing parties (Centre, Left and Right) on the one hand, and, on the other, people who feel close to Far-Left and Far-Right parties as well as people who do not feel close to any party. We draw on the French sociological literature on ordinary attitudes to politics to discuss our results as well as the cultural pathways via which political beliefs can affect perceptions of vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

BackgroundThis study aimed to assess: 1) vaccine hesitancy (VH) prevalence among French general practitioners (GPs) through the frequency of their vaccine recommendations, and 2) the determinants of these recommendations.MethodsCross-sectional observational study in 2014 nested in a national panel of 1712 randomly selected GPs in private practice in France. We constructed a score of self-reported recommendation frequency for 6 specific vaccines to target populations.Results16% to 43% of GPs sometimes or never recommended at least one specific vaccine to their target patients. Multivariable logistic regressions of the dichotomized score showed that GPs recommended vaccines frequently when they felt comfortable explaining their benefits and risks to patients (OR = 1.87; 1.35–2.59), or trusted official sources of information highly (OR = 1.40; 1.01–1.93). They recommended vaccines infrequently when they considered that adverse effects were likely (OR = 0.71; 0.52–0.96) or doubted the vaccine's utility (OR = 0.21; 0.15–0.29).InterpretationOur findings show that after repeated vaccine controversies in France, some VH exists among French GPs, whose recommendation behaviors depend on their trust in authorities, their perception of the utility and risks of vaccines, and their comfort in explaining them. Further research is needed to confirm these results among health care workers in other countries.