Abstract

Due to the severe impact of COVID-19 on public health, rollout of the vaccines must be large-scale. Current solutions are not intended to promote an active collaboration between communities and public health researchers. We aimed to develop a digital platform for communication between scientists and the general population, and to use it for an exploratory study on factors associated with vaccination readiness. The digital platform was developed in Latvia and was equipped with dynamic consent management. During a period of six weeks 467 participants were enrolled in the population-based cross-sectional exploratory study using this platform. We assessed demographics, COVID-19-related behavioral and personal factors, and reasons for vaccination. Logistic regression models adjusted for the level of education, anxiety, factors affecting the motivation to vaccinate, and risk of infection/severe disease were built to investigate their association with vaccination readiness. In the fully adjusted multiple logistic regression model, factors associated with vaccination readiness were anxiety (odds ratio, OR = 3.09 [95% confidence interval 1.88; 5.09]), feelings of social responsibility (OR = 1.61 [1.16; 2.22]), and trust in pharmaceutical companies (OR = 1.53 [1.03; 2.27]). The assessment of a large number of participants in a six-week period show the potential of a digital platform to create a data-driven dialogue on vaccination readiness.

Highlights

  • The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2021 has specified infectious diseases as the main threat for this year

  • We developed a digital platform [24] that gives researchers the ability to create and manage study projects and to stratify participant cohorts in real time (Figure 1)

  • We found three factors were associated with vaccination readiness: the participants’ level of anxiety, their trust in pharmaceutical companies, and their feelings of social responsibility

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Summary

Introduction

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2021 has specified infectious diseases as the main threat for this year. The report indicates that COVID-19 has led to widespread loss of life and increased wealth inequality, and efforts to combat it have taken resources away from the research and treatment of other serious public health issues [1]. The World Health Organization (WHO) announced COVID-19 as a global pandemic on 11 March 2020. From the beginning of the pandemic to the end of May 2021, the total number of cases in Latvia has reached 133,098, and 125,712 have recovered during this period. The total number of deaths from COVID-19 was 2370 as of 31 May 2021 [4]. According to the Latvian Centre of Disease Prevention and Control [7], the percentage of the population that had been vaccinated was 21.2% as of the end of May 2021

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