Is It Possible to Sway Hesitant Patients to Take the COVID-19 Vaccine?

By Jonathan Springston, Editor, Relias Media

Disagreements about vaccine mandates and concerns about safety were the top reasons given among residents of a small New York county for why that had yet to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

In November 2021, researchers sent an online survey to 1,200 patients who had visited a primary care clinic in Elmira, NY, the seat of Chemung County, a rural area on the Pennsylvania border. Of 118 respondents, 21% said they were unwilling to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

Personal reasons, such as disagreeing with vaccine mandates, and fears about safety because of the solution’s rapid development were the top two reasons for avoiding the shot (32% and 23%, respectively). However, some of these respondents indicated they might change their minds if presented with more long-term safety data and other education.

“Providers should broach the subject of vaccination with their patients armed with the most current research and a willingness to appeal to what motivates patients on an individual basis,” the authors offered. “This recommendation requires more of a grassroots effort than can be accomplished with wide-reaching advertisements on television or social media marketing, but it may prove to be a local solution to a local problem.”

Researchers were troubled by the fact 66% of those who had not taken the vaccine indicated nothing could sway them to change their minds. “In community settings where these convicted individuals abound, herd immunity becomes less an attainable reality than it is a ‘pipe dream’ of improbability,” researchers wrote.

Although there are troubling signs here, the authors lamented several limitations to their work, including the fact there were so few responses (and an overall tiny sample size) along with the self-administered nature of the survey (specifically, “several non-vaccinated patients were offended at the mere mention of COVID-19 and chose not to participate in the survey” and “some patients chose to skip questions”).

If nothing else, statistics from the CDC and New York state indicate Chemung County residents are behind when it comes to vaccination rates. Across the United States, 67.4% of the population is fully vaccinated. More than 15 million New Yorkers are fully vaccinated (about three-quarters of the entire state population). Among roughly 84,000 residents in Chemung County, a little more than 46,000 have completed the vaccine series (about 55% of the total county population). These data track with other similarly sized counties near Chemung.

“How do we remove the politicalized stigma of the COVID-19 vaccine, and is non-partisan marketing enough? Where appeals to ethos and pathos have failed, what ultimately motivates the individual to set aside his convictions? Given the rates of unemployment and severe understaffing in health institutions, mandates were not the answer to this question,” the authors of the Chemung County survey wrote. “More studies on a sociological-economic level will need to be completed to answer these questions.”

For more on this and related subjects, be sure to read the latest issues of Hospital Infection Control & Prevention and Infectious Disease Alert.