Double Jab: Survey Evidence on Vaccine Hesitancy, Beliefs, and Attitudes in India

ABSTRACT

India witnessed a large surge in COVID-19 cases in April 2021, a second wave of nearly 350,000 daily new infections across the country. As of December 2021, cases have reduced drastically, in part due to greater vaccine coverage across the country. This study reports results on vaccine hesitancy, attitudes, and behaviors from an online survey conducted between February and March 2021 in nine Indian cities (N = 518). We find that vaccine hesitancy negatively predicts willingness to take the vaccine, and beliefs about vaccine effectiveness supersede hesitancy in explaining vaccine uptake. Furthermore, we find that mask-wearing and handwashing beliefs, information sources related to COVID-19, and past COVID-19 infection and testing status are all strongly associated with the hypothetical choice of vaccine. We discuss these findings in the context of behavioral theories as well as outline implications for vaccine-related health communication in India.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to two anonymous referees and senior editor Xiaoli Nan for helpful comments and suggestions. We thank Madhumeta Rajkumar and Subhashish Sarkar for valuable help with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Data were collected in India during February and March, 2021, when a significant proportion of the population was still ineligible to receive any COVID-19 vaccine. Therefore, this was framed as a hypothetical vaccine choice to enable future predictions of real vaccine choices. This enables us to understand drivers of vaccine choice once the participants in our sample became eligible to be vaccinated.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by Behavioural Insights Architecture and Strategy (BIAS) Inc., New Delhi.