COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in India: An Exploratory Analysis

  1. Sandip K. Agarwal
  2. Maharnab Naha

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Abstract

Vaccine hesitancy is context specific and varies over time and space. Therefore, strategies to tackle vaccine hesitancy based on evidence from high income countries are unlikely to serve the purpose adequately in LMICs. We use district level evidence on COVID-19 vaccine uptake rates from an LMIC - India to provide evidence of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. We argue that vaccination rates during the different phases of COVID-19 vaccination across the districts is likely to be related to vaccine hesitancy. Districts with larger rural population and lower literacy rates had lower vaccination rates. High past child immunization rates were positively correlated with COVID-19 vaccination uptake. Across the four phases of vaccination drive, vaccine hesitancy was the highest during the third phase of the vaccination drive, and therefore the above correlations were strongest during the third and the fourth phase. Measures of family planning indicators too seem to be correlated with vaccine uptakes during the third phase which indicate the regions most susceptible to vaccine hesitancy.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.09.15.21263646: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Ethicsnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variableUnmet need for family planning in a district measures the percentage of married women between the age of 15 to 49 years, who wish to adopt a family planning method but are currently not using any.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    A limitation of our study is that we do not observe vaccine hesitancy directly. We use low vaccination rates as a proxy for vaccine hesitancy. As vaccine hesitancy is defined as refusal or delay in getting vaccinated in spite of availability of a vaccine (MacDonald, 2015), we implicitly assume that the low vaccination rate was not a result of short supply of vaccine. While low vaccination rates could be driven by inadequate vaccine supply, our observations on vaccine hesitancy from district level trends on vaccination uptake would still hold unless there is a compelling reason to believe that vaccine shortages and supply disparities were motivated by socio-economic factors. We are not familiar with evidence that can support a pattern in short supply of vaccines across the districts.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.09.15.21263646v1 on medRxiv