Association of Knowledge with COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Under Emergency: A Nationally Study in China

ABSTRACT

Identifying and understanding the hesitancy degree of public COVID-19 vaccine in emergency may be helpful to the dissemination of vaccine-related public health information. Through a survey among the adult population of Chinese mainland (N = 1080) after the COVID-19 vaccine was approved for mass vaccination, it is found that although more than 80% of the public (87.8%) have a low hesitancy attitude towards COVID-19 vaccine, a considerable number of people still have a medium hesitancy and a high hesitancy attitude towards COVID-19 vaccine (the middle hesitancy rate is 9.8% and the high hesitancy rate is 2.4%). By multiple logistic regression, the subjective and objective knowledge levels of medium-high hesitancy group and low hesitancy group in COVID-19 vaccine were compared. The results showed that there were significant differences in subjective and objective knowledge levels between medium-high hesitancy group and low-hesitancy group in COVID-19 vaccine. Compared with those with low hesitancy, those with medium and high hesitancy have lower subjective knowledge level and objective knowledge level. The influence of subjective knowledge level on public vaccine hesitancy is significantly greater than that of objective knowledge. In addition, through multiple linear regression, the study found that the information channel had a significant impact on the public's subjective and objective knowledge. Receiving vaccine information from television, web pages, health professionals, health departments can promote subjective knowledge and objective knowledge, while receiving vaccine information from family and friends reduces subjective knowledge and objective knowledge. Considering the geographical location of the population in this study, the research results in this paper cannot be extended to the public in other countries. However, the method used in this paper is helpful for researchers to understand the hesitancy degree of COVID-19 vaccines in other places and its relationship with the public knowledge level of COVID-19 vaccines. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.