Addressing COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy

Dear Editor, we would like to share ideas on “Addressing COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in South Africa- moving beyond a reliance on information-based responses.”¹ Intervention tactics must therefore be a part of larger development and trust-building initiatives that emphasize connections, transparency, inclusion, equity, and justice, according to Cooper et al. This, according to Cooper et colleagues,¹ is crucial if we want to increase demand for and acceptance of vaccinations both during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.¹

Local public health laws to address COVID-19 may be favored or opposed depending on a variety of variables. The finest illustration is vaccine anxiety, which has been connected to confidence in the community’s healthcare system.² The degree of trust a person had in their local public health system during the COVID-19 outbreak affected their willingness to take public health measures for outbreak containment.³ Also, it is evidenced that people’s preferences for acceptance are always changing when the situation change. Therefore, it is necessary to recognize the different hesitancy phenomenon occurring at different periods. Instead of using the conventional cross-sectional study design on the vaccine reluctance phenomena, a longitudinal study paradigm was used to examine the effects of COVID-19 immunization, local public health policies against COVID-19 and the evolving COVID-19 scenario.⁴

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.