Strategy on coping with COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy

ABSTRACT

Vaccine hesitancy is the major barrier for achieving protection for individual and population, reversing the progress achieved by immunization programs. Vaccine hesitance causes severe outcomes, and is the phenomenon emerges with the process of vaccination. Vaccine hesitancy lead to the diseases those have already been eliminated or well under controlled comeback or escalate into outbreak. Since the vaccine hesitancy impact continues to increase in recent years, vaccine hesitancy has been ranked one of the top ten global threats to human health. And now vaccine hesitancy is also the key barrier during the COVID-19 pandemic in controlling the disease globally and domestically by massively vaccinating. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the growing hesitancy is real, and reminds us that it cannot work if people refuse to be vaccinated, the herd immunity cannot be achieved, and there is limited chance to control the domestic sporadic epidemic and international imported risks. Vaccine hesitancy has complicated reasons, majorly categorized into vaccine confidence, including evaluation on safety and efficacy;complacency, including the underestimated disease burden and overconfidence on controlling the highly contagious disease;and convenience, including vaccine experimenting, producing, vaccinating and price. This article thoroughly analyses the background, causes, outcomes, hesitancy during COVID-19, and solutions to address vaccine hesitancy, to better increase the vaccine confidence among health care providers and the general public.