Habib Syed Shahid, Alamri Musab Saleh, Alkhedr Mudafr Mahmoud, Alkhorijah Mohammad Abdullah, Jabaan Rayan Dhafer, Alanzi Mubarak Khalid
Department of Physiology, College of Medicine, King Saud University, Riyadh 11461, Saudi Arabia.
College of Medicine, King Saud University, Riyadh 11461, Saudi Arabia.
Vaccines (Basel). 2022 Mar 31;10(4):541. doi: 10.3390/vaccines10040541.
Medical students are the future caregivers of communities, and therefore it is important to rectify their misconceptions about the COVID-19 vaccine. We aimed to explore the knowledge and attitudes among medical students toward the COVID-19 vaccine in Saudi Arabia and to compare the level of knowledge between preclinical and clinical years. This epidemiological cross-sectional study of 1445 (47.3% were pre-clinical and 52.7% were clinical year) medical students was conducted at various universities in Saudi Arabia using a simple random sampling technique. The results revealed that 34.3% students did not know how the Pfizer vaccine worked, with a high proportion in preclinical students (69.4%). Almost 37% of participants thought that one could become infected with COVID-19 via the COVID-19 vaccine, and 67.1% of these students were pre-clinical. About 22.6% of students did not trust COVID-19 vaccine information from the health ministry, and the majority of them (79.8%) were pre-clinical. Vaccine hesitancy was shown by about 33.3% ( = 481) of subjects, and surprisingly, almost half of them (48.6%) thought that the COVID-19 vaccine involved conspiracy; the majority of them were pre-clinical (97.9%). The overall response of students indicates a significantly lower level of knowledge and increased negative attitudes of preclinical students toward the COVID-19 vaccine. However, the vast majority of students agreed on the importance of the COVID-19 vaccine to decrease the spread of the disease.
医学生是社区未来的医疗服务提供者，因此纠正他们对新冠疫苗的误解很重要。我们旨在探讨沙特阿拉伯医学生对新冠疫苗的知识和态度，并比较临床前阶段和临床阶段学生的知识水平。这项对1445名医学生（47.3%为临床前阶段学生，52.7%为临床阶段学生）开展的流行病学横断面研究，是在沙特阿拉伯的多所大学采用简单随机抽样技术进行的。结果显示，34.3%的学生不知道辉瑞疫苗的作用原理，临床前阶段学生中的比例较高（69.4%）。近37%的参与者认为接种新冠疫苗可能会感染新冠病毒，其中67.1%的学生为临床前阶段学生。约22.6%的学生不信任卫生部提供的新冠疫苗信息，其中大多数（79.8%）是临床前阶段学生。约33.3%（n = 481）的受试者表现出疫苗犹豫，令人惊讶的是，其中近一半（48.6%）认为新冠疫苗涉及阴谋；他们中的大多数是临床前阶段学生（97.9%）。学生的总体反应表明，临床前阶段学生对新冠疫苗的知识水平显著较低，且负面态度有所增加。然而，绝大多数学生认同新冠疫苗对减少疾病传播的重要性。
