COVID-19 vaccination readiness among Russian-speaking residents in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan in 2020–2022: a scoping review

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on the mental health and well-being of people around the world. Vaccination is one of the key components of preventing the spread of COVID-19. However, despite the high risks of COVID-19, there is widespread disapproval and hostility towards vaccination and restrictive measures aimed at stopping the infection process. The spread of misinformation about vaccines, which has a long history as far back as the 18th and 19th centuries, increases distrust of immunization, but in turn is based on different beliefs about the sources of health and disease accepted in society. Vaccine skepticism is believed to be one of the global threats to public health and the achievement of population immunity against infections. In this connection, population data on attitudes towards vaccination within the largest possible number of social subgroups are of interest.
 A review was made of the subject field of scientific articles in Russian from 01/01/2020 to 02/28/2022, which reported on the attitude to vaccination of more than 12 thousand respondents from the Russian-speaking population of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and described the factors influencing the formation of readiness for immunoprophylaxis against the new coronavirus infection. The percentage of respondents who agreed, disagreed and doubted about the implementation of vaccination was determined, with the calculation of the median values for the included publications without taking into account the weight of each of the presented studies.
 Compared with a large number of foreign countries, the Russian-speaking population showed both high levels of unwillingness to be vaccinated against COVID-19 (30%) and relatively low rates of readiness for immunoprophylaxis (47%). The factors associated with different types of attitudes towards vaccination were analyzed. The conclusion is made about the validity of using theoretical models for describing health-related behavior to improve the quality and information content of Russian biomedical and socio-psychological research.