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Unpaid work carried out inside the home has increased in the pandemic, and evidence points to women’s share in care responsibilities and domestic tasks remaining higher than those of men in the pandemic, continuing the gender divides of past decades.

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The success of mass vaccination programs against SARS-CoV-2 hinges on the public’s acceptance of the vaccines. During a vaccine roll-out, individuals have limited information about the potential side-effects and benefits. Given the public health concern of the COVID pandemic, providing appropriate information fast matters for the success of the campaign. In this paper, time-trends in vaccine hesitancy were examined using a sample of 35,390 respondents from the Eurofound’s Living, Working and COVID-19 (LWC) data collected between 12 February and 28 March 2021 across 28 European countries. The data cover the initial stage of the vaccine roll-out. We exploit the fact that during this period, news about rare cases of blood clots with low blood platelets were potentially linked to the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine (or Vaxzeveria). Multivariate regression models were used to analyze i) vaccine hesitancy trends, and whether any trend-change was associated with the link between the AstraZeneca vaccine ii) and blood clots (AstraZeneca controversy), and iii) the suspension among several European countries. Our estimates show that vaccine hesitancy increased over the early stage of the vaccine roll-out (0·002, 95% CI: [0·002 to 0·003]), a positive shift took place in the likelihood of hesitancy following the controversy (0·230, 95% CI: [0·157 to 0·302]), with the trend subsequently turning negative (-0·007, 95% CI: [-0·010 to -0·005]). Countries deciding to suspend the AstraZeneca vaccine experienced an increase in vaccine hesitancy after the suspensions (0·068, 95% CI: [0·04 to 0·095]). Trust in institutions is negatively associated with vaccine hesitancy. The results suggest that SARS-CoV-2 vaccine hesitancy increased steadily since the beginning of the vaccine roll-out and the AstraZeneca controversy and its suspension, made modest (though significant) contributions to increased hesitancy.

The objective of this report is to explore (a) the incomes of retirees in Ireland and (b) the distribution of supplementary pensions among them, although clearly there is a close relationship between (a) and (b). Our focus is on retirees and not on the full population of those aged 65 and over. For this reason, the analysis focuses on (a) men who are now retired but who have worked for at least fifteen years and (b) women who are now retired but who have worked for at least ten years. We find that the average income of male retirees is 58 per cent higher than that of female retirees. Much of this difference is driven by the fact that about half of the male retirees have supplementary pension compared to about a third of female retirees. In the case of both genders, factors such as education and having been a public sector worker are associated with having supplementary pensions. Career continuity matters for both genders too but in slightly different ways. For men, longer tenure with the same employer is important in determining the access to a supplementary pension but for women total work experience across all employers matters. The analysis suggests that any universal cut in the State pension would be regressive because the incomes of lower income groups would be disproportionately reduced.