When comparing pre-pandemic and post-pandemic surveys, researchers found out that vaccine confidence is remarkably lower in the post-pandemic reports across all demographics. According to SciTechDaily, this was the case even if vaccination campaigns turned out successful.
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Post-Pandemic Vaccine Confidence Plummet
These findings were documented in a Vaccine study.
To know the attitudes towards vaccines and the factors that may make people hesitate and refuse, researchers from the University of Portsmouth conducted two surveys that were anonymous in 2019 and 2022 winters.
The specialists compared the responses of over a thousand adults. Upon doing so, they found out that the post-pandemic group had lesser vaccine confidence compared to that of the pre-pandemic.
According to the study, close to one out of four participants had reported declining vaccine confidence since the year 2020. These findings were observed to be present across various genders, ages, ethnicities, education, and religion.
Associate Head Dr. Alessandro Sianni shared that even if vaccination hesitancy is not new, several people were particularly hostile towards coronavirus vaccines even if there was rich scientific evidence regarding their potency and safety.
Through the survey, respondents were asked to rate how much they agreed to statements regarding the safety of vaccines, whether it should be compulsory or not, if it it would benefit others, and so on.
Across the two surveys, respondents that had religious beliefs had higher levels of vaccine hesitancy compared to agnostics and atheists. Moreover, people who had Asian and Black backgrounds also exhibited more hesitancy compared to those from White backgrounds. Gender, however, revealed no significant link with vaccine confidence.
Though there were several overarching trends that stayed similar across the two surveys, there were noteworthy alterations observed in the post-pandemic one. For one, the results showed that though middle-aged respondents from 2019 were more apprehensive about vaccinations compared to the younger ages, this was no longer the case in the 2022 group.
Dr. Siani shares how it could likely be because severe cases are more common among patients who are older.
Cross-Sectional Comparison
While this study sheds light into the attitudes towards vaccinations, it is left with some limitations. Because the first survey was meant to be a research piece on its own, the sample was different for the 2022 survey. According to Medical Economics, this made the study cross-sectional and not longitudinal.
Dr. Siani expressed how they never expected a global pandemic to take place just months after their surveys. He notes how their findings don't reveal changed views of the same sample, but rather, the findings show a comparison between two different samples. Because of this, they should be handled lightly and not definitively.
He notes, however, that their findings concur with observations regarding how declined confidence towards vaccines may have become another consequence of the pandemic.
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