The importance of addressing social inequalities and targeting the undecided to promote vaccination against COVID-19

As vaccines against COVID-19 are distributed across the Western Pacific, it is vital to investigate the barriers and enablers of vaccine acceptance in countries across the region. A paper in the latest issue of The Lancet Regional Health - Western Pacific presents the first multivariate analysis of attitudinal and sociodemographic predictors of vaccine intentions against COVID-19 in New Zealand.

Among the surveyed sample of 1,284 New Zealanders, 71% indicated they would likely accept the vaccine; 15% were unsure, 5% were somewhat unlikely, and 10% were very unlikely to do so. Vaccine acceptance was commonly motivated by a combination of several reasons. The most important reasons were avoiding COVID-19 illness, protecting others from infection, returning to ‘normal’ and promoting herd immunity. Older respondents were more likely to be motivated by protecting themselves against catching COVID-19 than were younger respondents. Younger respondents and those with lower educational attainment were less willing to vaccinate, while women and lower-income households were more likely to be unsure. Non-acceptors (i.e., unsure or unlikely to vaccinate) tended to have concerns about unknown future adverse effects and vaccine side effects. Women were more concerned about vaccine impacts on their health, while men were more likely to distrust vaccines or believed that the threat of COVID-19 was overstated. Younger respondents were more likely to have concerns about unknown future vaccine effects relative to older respondents. Unlike in descriptive findings, regression analyses showed that ethnicity was not associated with vaccine acceptance when socioeconomic measures were included in the model.