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https://theconversation.com/we-measured-vaccine-confidence-pre-pandemic-and-in-2022-its-declined-considerably-193580>
"It’s one of the greatest achievements of modern science. Within only a year of
SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus that causes COVID-19) being identified, safe and
effective vaccines were developed, tested, and had begun to be rolled out.
Since the first doses were administered nearly two years ago, they’re estimated
to have saved tens of millions of lives.
And yet COVID vaccines attracted considerable opposition before their
development was even complete. While vaccine hesitancy is not a new phenomenon,
COVID vaccines were met with particularly virulent hostility among conspiracy
theorists and other anti-vaxxers.
Meanwhile, the vaccines’ rapid development and approval gave way to a new group
of vaccine sceptics. These people don’t consider themselves “anti-vaxxers”, and
didn’t necessarily oppose other vaccinations, but had concerns over the speed
at which COVID vaccines were tested and approved.
This leads to the question of whether, despite the undeniable success of COVID
vaccination campaigns, public confidence in vaccines has decreased since the
onset of the pandemic.
My student and I sought to answer this question in our recently published
study, in which we compared vaccine confidence pre-pandemic and since the
rollout of COVID vaccines.
We compared the results of two online surveys carried out in November 2019 and
January 2022, involving more than 1,000 adults. The survey responses showed
that confidence in vaccinations in the post-pandemic group was considerably
lower than in the pre-pandemic group.
A drop in vaccine confidence was observed regardless of participants’ age,
gender, religious beliefs, education and ethnicity."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
