The road to achieving herd immunity: factors associated with Singapore residents’ uptake and hesitancy of the COVID-19 vaccination

ABSTRACT

Objective

Achieving high vaccination rates is key to containing the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). This study evaluated the factors associated with uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Methods

Six hundred and seventy-six respondents were surveyed online between May and June 2021. Data on demographics, perception of the COVID-19 pandemic, and vaccine willingness and hesitancy factors were collected.

Results

Approximately 54.6% of the respondents had received the COVID-19 vaccination. Age (p = 0.001), males (OR 1.7, 95% CI 1.1–2.6, p = 0.026), ethnicity (p = 0.004), occupation (p = 0.003)), working in healthcare (OR 6.1, 95% CI 2.8–13.2, p < 0.001), smoking (OR 3.3, 95% CI 1.3–8.8, p = 0.014), seeing vaccination as a social responsibility (OR 3.8, 95% CI 1.2–12.0, p = 0.022) and believing the vaccine is important to end the COVID-19 pandemic (OR 2.7, 95% CI 1.1–6.1, p = 0.020) were associated with greater vaccination uptake.

Conclusion

Social responsibility and well-being of collective society are important values associated with vaccine uptake in an Asian society. Understanding factors behind vaccine uptake can help advise public health measures and strategies to achieve high levels of vaccination.

KEYWORDS:

• Vaccination
• COVID-19
• hesitancy
• perceptions
• public health

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Reviewer disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Author contributions

Li Feng Tan (LFT), Justina Angel Tan (JAT), Preetha Venugopalan Menon (PVM), Santhosh Seetharaman (SS) conceived, designed, and collected the data. Arthi Premkumar helped with data collection and literature review. Isabel Siow, Chan Yiong Huak and LFT did the data analysis. LFT, Tan Yong Qiang Benjamin (TYQB) wrote up and revised the manuscrtip.

Ethics statement

Ethics approval was obtained from the National Healthcare Group’s Institutional Review Board (IRB no: 2021/00158).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was not funded.