The State of Vaccine Confidence 2016: Global Insights Through a 67-Country Survey

By H. Larson, A. de Figueiredo, Xiahong Zhao, W. Schulz, P. Verger, Iain G. Johnston, Alex R. Cook, Nick S. Jones. EBioMedicine, 2016

1,062 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background Public trust in immunization is an increasingly important global health issue. Losses in confidence in vaccines and immunization programmes can lead to vaccine reluctance and refusal, risking disease outbreaks and challenging immunization goals in high- and low-income settings. National and international immunization stakeholders have called for better monitoring of vaccine confidence to identify emerging concerns before they evolve into vaccine confidence crises. Methods We perform a large-scale, data-driven study on worldwide attitudes to immunizations. This survey – which we believe represents the largest survey on confidence in immunization to date – examines perceptions of vaccine importance, safety, effectiveness, and religious compatibility among 65,819 individuals across 67 countries. Hierarchical models are employed to probe relationships between individual- and country-level socio-economic factors and vaccine attitudes obtained through the four-question, Likert-scale survey. Findings Overall sentiment towards vaccinations is positive across all 67 countries, however there is wide variability between countries and across world regions. Vaccine-safety related sentiment is particularly negative in the European region, which has seven of the ten least confident countries, with 41% of respondents in France and 36% of respondents in Bosnia & Herzegovina reporting that they disagree that vaccines are safe (compared to a global average of 13%). The oldest age group (65+) and Roman Catholics (amongst all faiths surveyed) are associated with positive views on vaccine sentiment, while the Western Pacific region reported the highest level of religious incompatibility with vaccines. Countries with high levels of schooling and good access to health services are associated with lower rates of positive sentiment, pointing to an emerging inverse relationship between vaccine sentiments and socio-economic status. Conclusions Regular monitoring of vaccine attitudes – coupled with monitoring of local immunization rates – at the national and sub-national levels can identify populations with declining confidence and acceptance. These populations should be prioritized to further investigate the drivers of negative sentiment and to inform appropriate interventions to prevent adverse public health outcomes.

Subfields: Epidemiology, Health, Microbiology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c67a731895fe19e5782fd80d9dfe2e83312339a8

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Malik Sallam

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Citations in the corpus

Beyond confidence: Development of a measure assessing the 5C psychological antecedents of vaccination (2018, methodology): “In addition, the existing scales are quite lengthy and use between 8 and 20 items to assess different facets of confidence (Table 1)–with the exception of the GVCI, which has only 4 items.”
Intention to participate in a COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial and to get vaccinated against COVID-19 in France during the pandemic (2020, neutral): “This is a particular concern in France, which has been shown to be the leader-country of vaccine hesitancy [8].”
Leveraging media and health communication strategies to overcome the COVID-19 infodemic (2020, background): “She based her prediction on epidemiological studies showing that confidence in vaccines decreased between 2015 and 2018 [4, 5].”
COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Worldwide: A Concise Systematic Review of Vaccine Acceptance Rates (2021, background): “Besides Africa, more studies are needed from Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Central and South America to reach reliable conclusions about the scope of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy around the globe.”
How Trust in Experts and Media Use Affect Acceptance of Common Anti-Vaccination Claims (2020, background): “…also reinforce a March 2019 plea from the American Medical Association to the social media platforms that argued that “it is extremely important that people who are searching for information about vaccination have access to accurate, evidence-based information grounded in science” (Madara, 2019).”