Cross-National Vaccine Concerns and Predictors of Vaccine Hesitancy in Not-Fully Vaccinated Individuals: Findings from USA, Canada, Sweden, and Italy

Abstract

Vaccine hesitancy is a key contributor to reduced COVID-19 vaccine uptake and remains a threat to COVID-19 mitigation strategies as many countries are rolling out the campaign for booster shots. The goal of our study is to identify and compare the top vaccine concerns in four countries: Canada, Italy, Sweden, and the USA and how these concerns relate to vaccine hesitancy. While most individuals in these countries are now vaccinated, we expect our results to be helpful in guiding vaccination efforts for additional doses, and more in general for other vaccines in the future. We sought to empirically test whether vaccine related concerns followed similar thematic issues in the four countries included in this study, and then to see how these themes related to vaccine hesitancy using data from a cross-sectional survey conducted in May 2021. We applied CFA and created vaccine concern scales for analysis. We then utilized these results in regression-based modeling to determine how concerns related to vaccine hesitancy and whether there were similar or different concerns by country. The results quantitatively highlight that the same vaccine related concerns permeated multiple countries at the same point in time. This implies that COVID-19 vaccination communications could benefit from global collaboration.

Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice of Vaccination Among Parents in Jeddah City, Saudi Arabia

“…Research has shown that a significant proportion of parents have concerns about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines [ 19 ], with some still believing that vaccines can cause autism. Even in developed countries, research has found that vaccine hesitancy remains a concern in Canada, despite high levels of vaccine acceptance [ 20 ]. In a study conducted in 2010 by Chang et al, the rate of people agreeing that vaccines cause autism was higher among hesitant parents (p < 0.001) [ 21 ].…”

Understanding Parental Attitudes toward Vaccination: Comparative Assessment of a New Tool and Its Trial on a Representative Sample in Hungary

“…Second, as with any attitudes, vaccine hesitancy can change over time depending on the current circumstances (e.g., the presence of a pathogen within community). Third, our analysis focused on sociodemographic characteristics, though other factors may significantly affect vaccine hesitancy [36][37][38].…”