Examining drivers of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in Ghana

<div>Report 3, published 19 July 2021. Fully open-access.</div><div><br></div><div>We conducted a nationally representative online survey in Ghana (N = 1295) throughout June 2021.<br></div><div><br></div><div>In our analyses, we operationalised vaccine hesitancy as respondents who answered ‘no’ and ‘I don’t know’ to the question: “When a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available to you, would you like to get vaccinated?” </div><div><br></div><div><p>Some top-level findings to share<br> - willingness to vaccinate dropped from 82% in March, to 71% in June 2021<br> - Therefore, to phrase another way, there was an observed and significant increase in hesitancy, from 18% to 29% across this time period.<br> - 32% of respondents reported that they had recently seen or heard stories about the indecision surrounding the Oxford Astrazeneca vaccine rollout in Europe and North America. Of this 32% subgroup, 62.0% of them indicated that these stories made them feel worried about accepting the COVID-19 vaccine in the future.<br> - our main predictors of hesitancy continue to include: i) education (more educated people were more likely to be hesitant; one hypothesis is perhaps more likely to have greater access to the internet and thus availability of misinformation via social media); ii) females more hesitant than males; and iii) political allegiance (voting for the opposition parties was greater predictor of hesitancy).</p> <p> </p> We hope that this information can be helpful with informing the health promotion efforts from the GHS, Ministry of Health and other stakeholders. </div><div><br></div><div>For the previous report from this series of Ghana surveys (covering surveys in August 2020 and March 2021), see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351327020_Examining_drivers_of_COVID-19_vaccine_hesitancy_in_Ghana</div>