Venkatesan Kirthika, Menon Sukrita, Haroon Nisha Nigil
Department of Medicine, Caribbean Medical University School of Medicine, Willemstad, Curaçao.
Amala Institute of Medical Sciences, Thrissur, Kerala, India.
J Educ Health Promot. 2022 Jul 29;11:218. doi: 10.4103/jehp.jehp_940_21. eCollection 2022.
Vaccine hesitancy leads to an increase in morbidity, mortality, and health-care burden. Reasons for vaccine hesitancy include anti-vax group statements, misinformation about vaccine side effects, speed of vaccine development, and general disbelief in the existence of viruses like COVID-19. Medical students are future physicians and are key influencers in the uptake of vaccines. Hence, investigating vaccine hesitancy in this population can help to overcome any barrier in vaccine acceptance.
In this paper, we review five articles on COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in medical students and consider potential future research. All published papers relevant to the topic were obtained through extensive search using major databases. Inclusion criteria included studies that specifically investigated COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in medical students published between 2020 and 2021. Exclusion criteria included studies that investigated vaccine hesitancy in health-care professionals, allied health, and viruses apart from COVID-19. A total of 10 studies were found from our search.
Based on our exclusion criteria, only five studies were included in our review. The sample size ranged from 168 to 2133 medical students. The percentage of vaccine hesitancy in medical students ranged from 10.6 to 65.1%. Reasons for vaccine hesitancy included concern about serious side effects, vaccine efficacy, misinformation and insufficient information, disbelief in public health experts, financial costs, and belief that they had acquired immunity.
These results suggest that vaccine hesitancy is an important cause of the incidence and prevalence of COVID-19 cases. Identifying the barriers of vaccine hesitancy in prospective physicians can help increase vaccination uptake in the general public. Further research is necessary to identify the root cause of these barriers.
疫苗犹豫导致发病率、死亡率和医疗负担增加。疫苗犹豫的原因包括反疫苗组织的声明、关于疫苗副作用的错误信息、疫苗研发速度以及对新冠病毒等病毒存在的普遍怀疑。医学生是未来的医生，也是疫苗接种的关键影响者。因此，调查这一人群中的疫苗犹豫情况有助于克服疫苗接受方面的任何障碍。
在本文中，我们回顾了五篇关于医学生对新冠疫苗犹豫情况的文章，并考虑了未来可能的研究方向。通过使用主要数据库进行广泛搜索，获取了所有与该主题相关的已发表论文。纳入标准包括2020年至2021年期间专门调查医学生对新冠疫苗犹豫情况的研究。排除标准包括调查医护人员、相关健康专业人员以及除新冠病毒之外的其他病毒的疫苗犹豫情况的研究。我们的搜索共找到10项研究。
根据我们的排除标准，我们的综述仅纳入了五项研究。样本量从168名到2133名医学生不等。医学生中疫苗犹豫的比例从10.6%到65.1%不等。疫苗犹豫的原因包括对严重副作用的担忧、疫苗效力、错误信息和信息不足、对公共卫生专家的不信任、经济成本以及认为自己已获得免疫力。
这些结果表明，疫苗犹豫是新冠病例发病率和流行率的一个重要原因。确定未来医生中疫苗犹豫的障碍有助于提高普通公众的疫苗接种率。有必要进行进一步研究以确定这些障碍的根本原因。
