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. 2022 Mar 22;11(1):16.
doi: 10.1186/s13584-022-00527-8.

Understanding the phases of vaccine hesitancy during the COVID-19 pandemic

Dewesh Kumar  1 , Mansi Mathur  2 , Nitesh Kumar  3 , Rishabh Kumar Rana  4 , Rahul Chandra Tiwary  5 , Pankaja Ravi Raghav  6 , Amarendra Kumar  7 , Neelesh Kapoor  8 , Medha Mathur  9 , Tanya Tanu  10 , Soumitra Sethia  11 , Chandrakant Lahariya  12
Affiliations

Understanding the phases of vaccine hesitancy during the COVID-19 pandemic

Dewesh Kumar et al. Isr J Health Policy Res. .

Abstract

Vaccine hesitancy is an important feature of every vaccination and COVID-19 vaccination is not an exception. During the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine hesitancy has exhibited different phases and has shown both temporal and spatial variation in these phases. This has likely arisen due to varied socio-behavioural characteristics of humans and their response towards COVID 19 pandemic and its vaccination strategies. This commentary highlights that there are multiple phases of vaccine hesitancy: Vaccine Eagerness, Vaccine Ignorance, Vaccine Resistance, Vaccine Confidence, Vaccine Complacency and Vaccine Apathy. Though the phases seem to be sequential, they may co-exist at the same time in different regions and at different times in the same region. This may be attributed to several factors influencing the phases of vaccine hesitancy. The complexities of the societal reactions need to be understood in full to be addressed better. There is a dire need of different strategies of communication to deal with the various nuances of all of the phases. To address of vaccine hesitancy, an understanding of the societal reactions leading to various phases of vaccine hesitancy is of utmost importance.

Keywords: COVID 19 pandemic; COVID vaccine; Vaccine apathy; Vaccine complacency; Vaccine confidence; Vaccine eagerness; Vaccine hesitancy; Vaccine ignorance; Vaccine resistance.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Various phases of Vaccine hesitancy during COVID 19 pandemic. There are multiple phases of vaccine hesitancy: Vaccine Eagerness, Vaccine Ignorance, Vaccine Resistance, Vaccine Confidence, Vaccine Complacency and Vaccine Apathy. These are societal reactions observed or expected to be observed during various periods of COVID 19 pandemic in different regions of world
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