Journal paper - Household and community level factors and vaccine hesitancy

New Research: Community engagement, local government, public participation, gender, ethic and religious identity, and polio and routine immunization

Published in the Journal: Vaccine

Title: Understanding vaccine hesitancy in polio eradication in northern Nigeria

The Communication Initiative  would like to direct your attention to this paper recently published in Vaccine. In the spirit of full disclosure this research was led by Dr Sebastian
Taylor its Principal Investigator and coordinated by The Communication Initiative. Excerpts from the publicly available abstract follow.

Background: "Vaccine hesitancy constitutes a major threat to (polio eradication)" … "and to further expansion of routine immunization" … "equally important to protect and sustain the global gains available” … "important to protect and sustain the global gains available through routine immunisation in a time of rising scepticism and potential rejection of specific vaccines or immunisation more generally.”

Methodology: "Based on a purposive sampling survey of 1653 households in high- and low-performing rural, semiurban and urban areas of three high-risk states of
northern Nigeria in 2013-14 (Sokoto, Kano and Bauchi)"

Focus:  … "sought to understand factors at household and community level associated with propensity to refuse polio vaccine"

Findings: "Ethnic and religious identity did not appear to be associated with risk of OPV refusal"; "Risk of vaccine refusal was highly clustered among households within a small sub-group of sampled settlements. Contrary to expectations, households in these settlements reported higher levels of expectation of government as service provider, but at the same time lesser confidence in the efficacy of their relations with government".

Conclusions: "Results suggest that strategies to address the micro-political dimension  of vaccination – expanding community-level engagement, strengthening the role of local government in public health, and enhancing public participation of women – should be effective in reducing non-compliance, as an important set of strategies …"

You can access the full paper at this link

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