Abstract
The impact of COVID-19 vaccination programmes on disease transmission, morbidity and mortality relies heavily on the population’s willingness to accept the vaccine. We explore Ghanaian adult citizens’ vaccine hesitancy attitudes and identify the likelihood of participation or non-participation in the government’s effort to get citizens vaccinated. A fully anonymised cross-sectional online survey of 2345 adult Ghanaians was conducted from 23 to 28 February 2021. Differences in intentions regarding COVID-19 vaccination were explored using Pearson Chi-square tests. Additionally, multinomial logistic regression was used to analyse the factors associated with willingness to receive vaccines. Responses were weighted using the iterative proportional fitting technique to generate a representative sample. About half (51%) of mostly urban adult Ghanaians over 15 years are likely to take the COVID-19 vaccine if made generally available. Almost a fifth (21%) of the respondents were unlikely to take the vaccine, while another 28% were undecided. Additionally, we find differences in vaccine hesitancy among some socio-demographic characteristics such as age, gender, and primary sources of information. Attaining the proverbial 63% to 70% herd immunity threshold in Ghana is only possible if the preventive vaccination programmes are combined with an enhanced and coordinated public education campaign. Such a campaign should focus on promoting the individual and population-level benefits of vaccination and pre-emptive efforts towards addressing misinformation about vaccines.
Highlights
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), a novel infectious disease, was declared a global pandemic on 11 March 2020 by the World Health Organisation [1]
The results indicate that about half (5 in 10 or 51%) of mostly urban adult Ghanaians over 15 years are likely to take the COVID-19 vaccine if generally made available by the Government of Ghana (Table 1)
Our survey results suggest that chances of attaining the coveted 63–70% herd immunity threshold in Ghana would be enhanced if the preventive vaccination programmes, which are underway in-country, are combined with an enhanced and coordinated public education campaign so that at least 19.57 million Ghanaians and residents are vaccinated within an acceptable time frame (Table 3)
Summary
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), a novel infectious disease, was declared a global pandemic on 11 March 2020 by the World Health Organisation [1]. Some of these interventions were subsequently lifted on 20 April 2020 following a three-week restriction on movement within parts of the Greater Accra and Greater Kumasi metropolis—the two most populous regions in the country [11,12,13]. These public health measures were imposed as a stop-gap measure against an anticipated development of safe and efficacious COVID-19 vaccines, without which containing the spread of the virus would be almost impossible
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