Vaccine Hesitancy: COVID-19 to Influenza

AJMC Back in 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) deemed vaccine hesitancy—the outright refusal or reluctance to get vaccinated regardless of the availability of vaccines—as a top-10 threat to global health.¹ At the time, WHO estimated that vaccinations prevented up to 3 million deaths each year; furthermore, an additional 1.5 million deaths could be prevented if global vaccine awareness, coverage, and efforts were enhanced. The topic of vaccine hesitancy has been studied dating back to the 1960s; however, in the wake of COVID-19 vaccination campaigns and residual anxiety, these research endeavors have more than tripled. A systematic literature review published in Vaccines found that there were 1160 scientific publications concerned with the subject in the pre–COVID-19 era (1968-2021), and this number jumped to a striking 4563 publications post COVID-19 (2021 onwards).²

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