A cross sectional study exploring determinants for vaccine awareness, belief and hesitancy among health care professionals regarding Covid-19 vaccine, findings from a teaching hospital based in coal capital of India.

BACKGROUND

India intends to start its 1 dose of vaccination against Covid-19 on January 16, 2021 prioritizing its frontline health care professionals with either of the two vaccines-Covaxin or Covishield. Whenever a new vaccine is launched, it is marred with controversy and myths. To understand the doubts and concerns better, this study was conducted on health care professionals working in a tertiary care hospital.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Willing respondents, who are working in the institute, were administered the questionnaire asking their views on knowledge, beliefs, and reasons for hesitancy regarding Covid-19 immunization. A Likert scale was used to quantify the responses regarding participants' knowledge, beliefs, and hesitancies regarding immunization with the available vaccines. Data were analyzed using MS office Excel sheets and JASP software was used to analyze the data thus obtained.

RESULTS

Out of 122 complete responses, we had 73 (60%) doctors, while 30 (24%) were nursing staff, the rest comprised of other health care workers, such as housekeeping staff, janitorial, etc., 66 (54%) respondents were unaware, while 25 (20%) respondents had hesitancy and 23 (18%) were having extremely negative views regarding vaccination. Some of the variables, such as age, role, marital status, gender, etc., were found to be possibly associated with these scores.

CONCLUSION

Issues like concerns over vaccine safety, efficacy, reliability, etc., are deterrents for individuals and whole programme and vaccination drive across the nation. Time and again it has been seen that despite the vaccines' contribution in breaking the transmission, concerns are making people either hesitant or unmotivated to get the vaccines. More dialogues from the authorities regarding the issues of concern may pave the way for more motivation to accept vaccination and increase the vaccination coverage.