The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically affected the lives of people worldwide. Countries’ efforts to fight the pandemic have included a variety of strict measurements including intermittent lockdowns of regions and countries [4]. Despite the disease’s deadliness, the healthcare sector has become one of the most important leaders in efforts against COVID-19; it responded immediately despite shortages of critical protective equipment and resources that has directly affected survival rates of patients flooding COVID-19 departments. Hence, we hypothesized that the current COVID-19 pandemic would increase compliance with future vaccinations, especially among healthcare workers. The data demonstrate several positive predictors for vaccination: status as a physician, employment in a healthcare setting caring specifically for SARS-CoV-2 positive patients, unemployment during the quarantine period, and sex- specifically male, with negative predictors including: status as a nurse and parenthood.
Our results indicate that healthcare providers not caring for COVID-19 positive patients appeared to be less trustful of a COVID-19 vaccine than the general population. Nurses, in addition, tend to be more vaccine hesitant than physicians. Though nurses have slightly higher rates of annual influenza vaccination than the general population, nurses remain much more hesitant about COVID-19 inoculation than the general population. This discovery is of major concern because healthcare workers represent the most reliable social resource to encourage vaccination among the general population.
We presumed that the devastating economic consequences of COVID-19-related restrictions would lead to an increase in compliance rates for potential future vaccines among the general population due to a desire to prevent catastrophic lay-offs, high underemployment levels, and school closures. Unemployment and job insecurity is a positive predictor for acceptance of COVID-19 vaccination, contrasting with parenthood as a negative predictor. A possible explanation for the observation that parenthood is a negative predictor of vaccination is that parents have heightened concerns for their own safety; potentially deleterious effects of a vaccine could compromise their ability to care for their children. Future research should elucidate the reasons underlying this intriguing association between parenthood and self-avoidance of vaccination.
There is a positive association for male acceptance of COVID-19 vaccination. Several independent reports demonstrate higher risks for severe COVID-19 infection, complications, and death among males [4]. While other sex-based health disparities have been extensively reviewed in public media, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, hypertension, and cancer[5], the sex-based difference in COVID-19 mortality can be an area of vaccine targeting towards men. This observation is of particular note because women tend to have higher influenza vaccination rates than men [6].
While “herd immunity” is achieved by high rates of vaccination dispersed homogeneously throughout a population [7], even higher vaccination rates are necessary among communities containing individuals at higher disease risk [8]. Sustained encouragement of people with greater health risks to accept the future COVID-19 vaccine could lead to reduced morbidity and mortality while at the same time releasing valuable resources of the healthcare system to deliver equally important ambulatory activity.
Government mandated social isolation techniques to avoid viral transmission have led to rising unemployment rates and school suspensions [9], leaving workers with tenuous economic situations and parents struggling to provide a residual educational framework at home. Additional emotional distress in the face of extensive media coverage of the rising numbers of casualties, overburdened health systems, and insufficient government responses to COVID-19 has perhaps risen communal anxieties and distrust in healthcare systems and state actors [10]. These fears could also be contributing to wariness of the safety of a potential COVID-19 vaccine among the general public.
Concerns among responders regarding potential COVID-19 vaccines provide an important perspective for possible interventional educational programs to enhance vaccination rates. Of greatest concern to Israeli healthcare and civilian respondents were issues related to quality control, side effects, and efficacy of the vaccine. While current literature covers extensively vaccine efficacy and safety [11,12], the vast majority of the responders’ concerns, both among healthcare workers and non-healthcare workers alike, are due to public uncertainty of the COVID-19 vaccine’s rapid development. These concerns could hamper the achievements of the scientific community and its attempts to disseminate the vaccine. While scaled-up vaccine-manufacturing capacities and strategies assure that vaccines will be affordable to most people, we as a scientific community must act to educate, inform, and intervene to increase COVID-19 compliance rates of the entire population.