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Injection fears and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy

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posted on 2023-03-21, 13:51 authored by Daniel Freeman, Sinéad Lambe, Ly-Mee Yu, Jason Freeman, Andrew ChadwickAndrew Chadwick, Cristian Vaccari, Felicity Waite, Laina Rosebrock, Ariane Petit, Samantha Vanderslott, Stephan Lewandowsky, Michael Larkin, Stefania Innocenti, Helen McShane, Andrew J Pollard, Bao Sheng Loe
Background: When vaccination depends on injection, it is plausible that the blood-injectioninjury cluster of fears may contribute to hesitancy. Our primary aim was to estimate in the UK adult population the proportion of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy explained by blood-injectioninjury fears.
Methods: 15,014 UK adults, quota sampled to match the population for age, gender, ethnicity, income, and region, took part (19th January–5th February 2021) in a nonprobability online survey. The Oxford COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Scale assessed intent to be vaccinated. Two scales (Specific Phobia Scale-blood-injection-injury phobia; Medical Fear Survey–injections and blood subscale) assessed blood-injection-injury fears. Four items from these scales were used to create a factor score specifically for injection fears.
Results: 3927 (26.2%) screened positive for blood-injection-injury phobia. Individuals screening positive (22.0%) were more likely to report COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy than individuals screening negative (11.5%), odds ratio=2.18, CI: 1.97-2.40, p<.001. The population attributable fraction indicated that if blood-injection-injury phobia were absent then this may prevent 11.5% of all instances of vaccine hesitancy, AF=0.11; 95% CI: 0.09-0.14, p<0.001. COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy was associated with higher scores on the Specific Phobia Scale, r=0.22, p<.001, Medical Fear Survey, r=0.23, p=<.001, and injection fears, r=0.25, p<.001. Injection fears were higher in youth and in Black and Asian ethnic groups, and explained a small degree of why vaccine hesitancy is higher in these groups.
Conclusions: Across the adult population, blood-injection-injury fears may explain approximately 10% of cases of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Addressing such fears will likely improve the effectiveness of vaccination programmes.

Funding

NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre and NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre (BRC-1215-20005)

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

  • Communication and Media

Published in

Psychological Medicine

Volume

53

Issue

4

Pages

1185 - 1195

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Cambridge University Press under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2021-06-09

Publication date

2021-06-11

Copyright date

2021

ISSN

0033-2917

eISSN

1469-8978

Language

  • en

Depositor

Prof Andrew Chadwick. Deposit date: 15 June 2021

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