Residents of LMICs also have more recent experiences with the life-saving benefits of other vaccines. If you politicize a response, you lose half the country one way or another.” “Unfortunately, in a lot of high-income countries, it’s been a political response. “In a lot of low- and middle-income countries, the pandemic response-good or bad-has been a national response,” says Omer. Why are wealthier nations so much more hesitant than LMICs? While the survey results don’t directly address this question, the researchers have a few theories. “Our paper shows that distributing vaccines to the rest of the world would be a high-return activity, because most people there are ready to take it.” “If we ended up with a new variant coming out of Latin America, Africa, or Asia, and the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are not effective against it, then we’re basically back to square one,” Mobarak explains. Improving access in LMICs, where vaccination rates are currently extremely low, could also help to prevent the emergence and spread of new COVID-19 variants. “If the goal is to maximize global vaccination coverage, distributing vaccines to countries in Asia and Africa that don’t currently have them is going to be a lot easier and cheaper than trying to convince the last 30% of Americans to get vaccinated,” he says. To Mobarak, the high levels of acceptance in LMICs suggest that prioritizing distribution to these countries could have important benefits. “If the goal is to maximize global vaccination coverage, distributing vaccines to countries in Asia and Africa that don’t currently have them is going to be a lot easier and cheaper than trying to convince the last 30 percent of Americans.” Just 64.6% percent of Americans and 30.4% of Russians said the same. The survey responses revealed notably different attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccine between wealthy and less wealthy nations, with 80.3% of people in LMICs expressing willingness to get the vaccine when available. With this foundational information in hand, the researchers hope to shift “from hunch-based policy to evidence-based policy,” Omer says. “Before designing any interventions to overcome vaccine hesitancy, we’re trying to understand the basic facts,” he says. The goal of the research, Mobarak explains, was to establish a clearer understanding of global vaccination attitudes by using a large and diverse sample of countries. Read a policy brief on the research from the International Growth Centre.
The authors include scholars from Innovations for Poverty Actions, the International Growth Center, the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale, WZB Berlin Social Science Center, and other institutions in countries around the world. Respondents were asked about their willingness to take the COVID-19 vaccine when available, as well as their motivations for taking it, concerns about it, and most trusted source of vaccine information. The research drew on phone surveys of more than 44,000 people in the United States, Russia, and 10 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) across Asia, Africa, and South America, administered between June 2020 and January 2021. Willingness to get the COVID-19 vaccine is significantly higher in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) than in the United States or Russia, according to the study on global COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and hesitancy, whose co-authors include Mushfiq Mobarak of Yale SOM and Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health. But according to a new study, once more vaccines are made available in the developing world, there will be plenty of people eager to receive them-a finding that underscores the importance of global vaccine equity in saving lives and preventing the evolution of new, more dangerous variants. Meanwhile, public health experts are raising the alarm that the highly contagious Delta variant is spreading through unvaccinated populations-and additional variants could arise as long as the disease is endemic. In the United States, where COVID-19 vaccines are plentiful, the biggest remaining obstacle to protecting the population is vaccine hesitancy.
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