COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Ghana: The Roles of Political Allegiance, Misinformation Beliefs, and Sociodemographic Factors

  1. Ken Brackstone
  2. Kirchuffs Atengble
  3. Michael G Head
  4. Laud A Boateng

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Abstract

The vast majority of people in the world who are unvaccinated against COVID-19 reside in LMIC countries in sub-Saharan Africa. This includes Ghana, where only 15.9% of the country are fully vaccinated as of April 2022. A key factor negatively impacting vaccination campaigns is vaccine hesitancy, defined as the delay in the acceptance, or blunt refusal, of vaccines. Four online cross-sectional surveys of Ghanaian citizens were conducted in August 2020 ( N = 3048), March 2021 ( N = 1558), June 2021 ( N = 1295), and February 2022 ( N = 424) to observe temporal trends of vaccine hesitancy in Ghana, and to examine key groups associated with hesitancy. Overall hesitancy decreased from 36.8% (95% CI: 35.1%-38.5%) in August 2020 to 17.2% (95% CI: 15.3%-19.1%) in March 2021. However, hesitancy increased to 23.8% (95% CI: 21.5%-26.1%) in June 2021, and then again to 52.2% (95% CI: 47.4%-57.0%) in February 2022. Key reasons included not having enough vaccine-related information (50.6%) and concerns over vaccine safety (32.0%). Hesitant groups included Christians, urban dwellers, opposition political party voters, people with more years of education, females, people who received COVID-19 information from internet sources, and people who expressed uncertainty about COVID-19 misinformation beliefs.

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  1. Version published to 10.1101/2022.03.16.22272463v2 on medRxiv
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2022.03.16.22272463: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    EthicsIRB: Ethical approval: The surveys received ethical approvals from University of Southampton Ethics Committee (ERGO ID: 57267).
    Consent: All participants provided informed consent.
    Sex as a biological variableDemographic variables: Finally, participants indicated their age, gender (female, male), marital status (single, in a relationship, married, separated, widowed), and religion (Christian, Muslim, other, no religion).
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    Data analysis: The data captured in Qualtrics were examined for errors, cleaned, and exported into IBM SPSS Statistics 28 for further analysis.
    SPSS
    suggested: (SPSS, RRID:SCR_002865)

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Limitations and strengths: The core strength of this study relates to its relatively large number of participants, including its comparison with hesitancy rates collected from previous surveys. The three surveys allows capture of changes in temporal trends. However, a significant limitation relates to the representativeness of the sample population, since only individuals with access to the internet could participate. Thus, certain demographic were under-represented, including individuals in rural areas and people of lower socio-economic status. Further, since our recruitment was conducted using cross-sectional convenience sampling methods, the presence of respondent bias (e.g., those who closely follow COVID-19-related news) may limit its findings. The efficiency of data collection, the lower cost to advertise, and the acceptability of online survey recruitment may provide a useful alternative than formal regional or national surveys – especially during a global pandemic where new information from population surveys via remote or virtual methods may be urgently required. This research team completed this same survey via in-person data collection in Nkwanta South (January 2022), a rural district in the Oti region. This will capture different demographics and allow for comparisons between datasets.

    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.

  3. Version published to 10.1101/2022.03.16.22272463v1 on medRxiv