The UK leads other countries in public willingness to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, a new report reveals.
The report presents the findings of a survey of about 13,500 people across 15 countries, which was carried out in November 2020 by Imperial College London’s Institute of Global Health Innovation and the market research and analytics firm, YouGov. The survey was conducted between 11 and 24 November 2020, before the recent approval of the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine.
The data highlight major differences in attitudes towards SARS-CoV-2 vaccination between countries. Among all countries surveyed, people in the UK showed the highest willingness to receive the vaccine next year (65%). This compared to an international level of 51 per cent and a rate of 35 per cent in France.
The report, part of an ongoing effort to monitor changing patterns of health-related behaviours and attitudes during the pandemic, also revealed commonly held safety concerns among the public. More than half of global respondents (54%) were worried about possible side effects, with people in France and Spain showing the greatest concern (66% and 67%) while those in the UK and Denmark had the least concern (31% and 29%).
Professor Ara Darzi, co-director of Imperial’s Institute of Global Health Innovation, said: “Vaccines are highly safe interventions and offer our best hope for controlling the pandemic and returning to normal life. But they will only be effective at tackling this virus if the public accept and are willing to receive them. As demonstrated by this report, more needs to be done to build the public’s trust around coronavirus vaccines so that immunisation campaigns worldwide can make a meaningful impact on curbing the virus.”
