Most vaccine-hesitant people eventually got Covid jab: UK study

Most people who were initially hesitant about getting vaccinated against Covid-19 eventually received the jab, an England-based study said Tuesday, illustrating that widespread public vaccine scepticism can be overcome.

Developed in record time, vaccines for Covid successfully curbed the pandemic after being rolled out in early 2021. The effectiveness and safety of these vaccines have been demonstrated by the billions of jabs administered across the world.

However before they became available, many people were dubious.

"Most Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy was rooted in concrete concerns that can be addressed and successfully overcome with time and increasing availability of information," the study in The Lancet journal said.

The research was based on questionnaires sent to more than a million people in England between January 2021 and March 2022.

Around eight percent of the respondents were hesitant to get a Covid jab in January 2021, when data about the jabs was mainly from clinical trials and not real life.

However a year later, just one percent of the respondents were still hesitant.

Almost two-thirds of the people who were initially sceptical went on to receive at least one dose of a Covid vaccine, according to data from the National Health Service cited in the study.

The most likely to change their mind were people who said they were initially worried about whether the vaccine was effective or had concerns about its impact on their health, the researchers found.

However people who had a low level of trust in institutions and experts, including pharmaceutical companies, or who were generally sceptical of vaccines, were more likely to hold firm against the jabs.

The study showed the "importance of ensuring that people have access to reliable and trusted information so they can make well-informed decisions," study co-author Paul Elliott of Imperial College London said in a statement.

Italian researchers Claudia Palmieri and Silvio Tafuri, who were not involved in the study, emphasised that the findings have implications beyond "the extraordinary setting" of the Covid pandemic.

"It is crucial to ascertain whether similar drivers of hesitancy" affect routine vaccinations for other contagious diseases such as measles or the flu, they wrote in a separate commentary in The Lancet.