Attitudes of Healthcare Professionals and General Population Toward Vaccines and the Intention to Be Vaccinated Against COVID-19 in Spain

Abstract

Background: To achieve herd immunity, the acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccine by the population, especially healthcare professionals, plays a key role. The objective of the present paper is to address the differences in attitudes among Spanish healthcare professionals compared with the general population regarding COVID-19 vaccination.Methods: This cross-sectional study included data from 2,136 adults (n = 664 healthcare professionals) from an online survey conducted from May 6 to June 9, 2021. The Vaccination attitudes examination scale was used to measure the negative attitudes toward vaccines. Four subscales: mistrust of vaccine benefit, worries about the unforeseen future effect, concerns about commercial profiteering, and preference for natural immunity were calculated. Generalized linear mixed models were conducted to study these associations.Results: Between 10.2 and 22.6% of the subjects showed high levels of negative attitudes toward vaccines. However, only 1.5% of our sample (2.1% among healthcare professionals) refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine when it was offered because they chose otherwise. Retired people showed the lowest concerns and the highest trust in vaccines. No statistically significant effects were found between working in a healthcare field and having higher positive attitudes toward vaccines.Conclusion: Low levels of rejection against the COVID-19 vaccine were identified in the present sample. However, despite being at a higher risk, health care professionals did not show higher positive attitudes toward vaccines. Furthermore, refusal percentage to vaccination was higher among healthcare professionals compared with non-healthcare professionals. Developing a strategy to increase positive attitudes against the COVID-19 vaccine should be an objective for public health policy.

Prevalence of COVID-19 Vaccination among Medical Students: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…Overall, no significant gender difference was observed between HCWs and the general population. However, based on results of Iguacel et al, (2021), females showed a statistically significantly higher percentage of mistrust compared to males [ 33 ].…”

Factors Associated with COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy after Implementation of a Mass Vaccination Campaign

“…In contrast, our previous study found increased odds of delaying vaccination for women [38], suggesting once more the changes associated with hesitancy over time. However, several studies reported lower odds of hesitancy for women [21], although this result was not always replicated [3,6,10,13,18,20,24,26,28]. When considering the month of response, the lower hesitancy for participants answering the questionnaire in September (versus November responders) lost statistical significance during the sensitivity analysis.…”

“…Hence, the reported vaccine acceptance or hesitancy was mostly assessed using hypothetical questions as there were still no vaccines available outside of the clinical trial setting [3][4][5][6][8][9][10]. Several cross-sectional studies have since explored COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and hesitancy and their determinants after the respective countries' vaccination program implementation, namely in European countries [2], such as the United Kingdom [15,16,20,21], Germany [15,22], Denmark [15,23], France [15], Hungary [15], Sweden [15], Italy [15], Norway [21], Poland [24], the Netherlands [25], Spain [26] and Greece [27]. Additional studies were also conducted in Saudi Arabia [28], the United States of America [13,17,21,29], South Africa [21,30], Jordan [31], Israel [32], Chile [33], China [18,21,34,35], Japan [21,36] and Australia [21], among others [21].…”

“…In these studies, COVID-19 vaccination acceptance or hesitancy varied according to age [2][3][4]6,[8][9][10]13,14,[16][17][18][20][21][22]24,30,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38], gender [3,6,10,13,14,16,18,[20][21][22]24,26,28,30,31,36], education [4,6,[8][9][10]13,14,17,18,21,22,24,…”

What determines health professionals’ COVID‐19 vaccine hesitancy? A nationwide study

“…Furthermore, studying vaccine hesitancy in health professionals is important not only to understand what drives their hesitancy but also because they can highly influence the attitudes and behaviours of their patients towards vaccination. 18 …”