TITLE:
COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Lebanon
AUTHORS:
Mariam Mando, Aseel Al Khansa, Yousef Zaitoun, Mariam Chokor, Bilal Elchehimi, Riham Dweik, Batoul Jaafar, Rayan Al Haj, Rim Nahme, Ismaeil Bazzi, Hayssam Chebli
KEYWORDS:
COVID-19, Vaccine, Logistic Regression, Hesitancy
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Access Library Journal,
Vol.9 No.12,
December
22,
2022
ABSTRACT: COVID-19 vaccine has become the topic of concern for the world population, and hesitation to vaccinate is among the top 10 global health by the World Health Organization (WHO). Questions about vaccine hesitancy are investigated in a sample (n = 2642) of Lebanese people through an online survey distributed in January 2022. The survey was made up of closed-ended questions that aim to study the relations between sociodemographic factors, general knowledge and attitudes about the COVID-19 vaccine, and vaccine hesitancy using bivariate analysis, and logistic regression models. R language is used to test the proposed relationships, the hypotheses are supported, the proposed models in logistic regression are proven to be fit and the implications are discussed. 70.4% of the participants are vaccinated, and 83.3% among them are willing to take the extra dose of the vaccine. 29.6% are not vaccinated, and among them, only 23.66% are willing to take the vaccine. Vaccination was significantly associated with more odds of being aged more than 50 (OR = 2.62) compared to participants aged less than 50. And of lower odds of being infected with coronavirus (OR = 0.69) compared to non-infected people and of more odds of gaining insights about COVID-19 vaccine from Health workers and scientific publications (OR = 3.94) compared to other sources of information. In a sub-group of 1860 vaccinated participants, the willingness of taking the next dose of the vaccine was significantly associated with lower odds of Medical field workers (OR = 0.36), knowing people who died of coronavirus infection (OR = 0.55), suffering from severe symptoms due to the vaccine (OR = 0.4) and taking another vaccine than AstraZeneca and Pfizer (OR = 0.45), and having taken already two doses of the vaccine (OR = 0.33) compared with their reference modalities.