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Vaccine nationalism among the public: A cross-country experimental evidence of own-country bias towards COVID-19 vaccination.

ABSTRACT: What types of vaccines are citizens most likely to accept? We argue that citizens' identification with their nation may lead them to prefer vaccines developed and produced within their national borders, to the exclusion and/or detriment of vaccines from other nations. We administered a conjoint experiment requesting 15,000 adult citizens across 14 individual countries from around the world to assess 450,000 profiles of vaccines that randomly varied on seven attributes. Beyond vaccine fundamentals such as efficacy rate, number of doses, and duration of the protection, we find that citizens systematically favor vaccines developed and produced in their own country of residence. The extent of preference in favor of vaccines developed and produced within the national borders is particularly large among citizens who identify more strongly with their nation, suggesting nationalism plays a role in explaining the bias in favor of vaccines developed and produced locally. This public opinion bias on vaccine preferences has significant theoretical and practical implications.

SUBMITTER: Barcelo J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9376148 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Vaccine nationalism among the public: A cross-country experimental evidence of own-country bias towards COVID-19 vaccination.

Barceló Joan J Sheen Greg Chih-Hsin GC Tung Hans H HH Wu Wen-Chin WC

Social science & medicine (1982) 20220815

What types of vaccines are citizens most likely to accept? We argue that citizens' identification with their nation may lead them to prefer vaccines developed and produced within their national borders, to the exclusion and/or detriment of vaccines from other nations. We administered a conjoint experiment requesting 15,000 adult citizens across 14 individual countries from around the world to assess 450,000 profiles of vaccines that randomly varied on seven attributes. Beyond vaccine fundamental ...[more]

PMID: 35994879

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Project description:BackgroundFrequent mutations of the COVID-19 virus, such as the Delta and Omicron variants, have prolonged the pandemic. Rich countries have approved the booster shots (3rd doses) of vaccine, but this causes further delay of vaccination in developing countries. This raises the risk of further mutations, which may lower the efficacy of currently available vaccines. As herd immunity by universal vaccination is essential to end the pandemic, the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access (COVAX) facility has been established to provide developing countries with subsidized vaccines. However, a critical issue is that the developing countries also need to effectively deploy vaccines to citizens. Although this argument suggests positive effects of good national governance on vaccination coverage, to the best of our knowledge, there is no cross-country evidence on the role of national governance in increasing the coverage of COVID-19 vaccines among citizens. The goal of this study was to examine the association between the national governance and vaccination coverage among developing countries.MethodsUsing cross-country data, an ordinary least squares regression was conducted to examine the association between the national governance index and three outcomes: (1) the number of days until the administration of the first dose in the country since December 2019, (2) the number of doses per 100 citizens as of the end of July 2021, and (3) the selection of approved vaccine manufacturers. The results were compared between the model including all countries and the model excluding the member countries of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).ResultsA one standard deviation increase in the national governance index was associated with 9.1 days (95%CI: -15.76, -2.43) earlier administration of vaccines in the country, and a 12.1 dose increase (95%CI: 4.76, 19.34) per 100 citizens. These associations were larger in the non-OECD sample. The results also indicated the role of governance in the selection of the administered vaccines.ConclusionThe provision of subsidized vaccines alone is not sufficient to control the spread of infection in developing countries; logistical and administrative support should also be offered, especially in countries with poor governance.Trial registrationNot applicable.

Project description:BackgroundForeign aid has been shown to be favourably biased towards small countries. This study investigated whether country size bias also occurs in national malaria policy and development assistance from international agencies.MethodsData from publicly available sources were collected with countries as observational units. The exploratory data analysis was based on the conceptual framework with socio-economic, environmental and institutional parameters. The strength of relationships was estimated by the Pearson and polychoric correlation coefficients. The correlation matrix was explored by factor analysis.ResultsMalaria burden is strongly correlated with GDP per capita, total health expenditure per capita, HDI; moderately with latitude, weakly with elevation, urban population share, per capita funding from the Global Fund, PMI USAID, UK government and UNICEF. Small country status is strongly correlated with population size, land area, island status; moderately with development assistance received per capita, weakly with funding per capita from Global Fund, government NMP and PMI USAID. Policy score 1, a variable derived from our factor analysis and related to malaria endemicity, is significantly strongly correlated with the malaria burden, moderately with HDI, GDP per capita, total health expenditure per capita, PMI USAID funding; weakly with island status, urban population share, latitude, coastal population share, total government expenditure and trade openness, Global Fund funding, World Bank funding, UK government funding, and UNICEF funding per capita. Policy score 2, which captures variation not related to malaria endemicity, is significantly weakly related to the ICRG index, PMI USAID funding per capita and small country status.ConclusionsThe results suggest that malaria burden and economic development are bidirectionally related. Economic development can contribute to a reduction in the malaria burden. Country size does not negatively impact malaria burden, but it does account for greater development assistance per capita from selected international agencies. National malaria policy is associated with parameters related to public governance and is modified in small countries. Small country bias is present in the distribution of socio-economic resources and the allocation of foreign aid. Small countries are characterized by distinct environmental and socio-political properties.

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Project description:COVID-19 severely impacted world health and, as a consequence of the measures implemented to stop the spread of the virus, also irreversibly damaged the world economy. Research shows that receiving the COVID-19 vaccine is the most successful measure to combat the virus and could also address its indirect consequences. However, vaccine hesitancy is growing worldwide and the WHO names this hesitancy as one of the top ten threats to global health. This study investigates the trend in positive attitudes towards vaccines across ten countries since a positive attitude is important. Furthermore, we investigate those variables related to having a positive attitude, as these factors could potentially increase the uptake of vaccines. We derive our text corpus from vaccine-related tweets, harvested in real-time from Twitter. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP), we derive the sentiment and emotions contained in the tweets to construct daily time-series data. We analyse a panel dataset spanning both the Northern and Southern hemispheres from 1 February 2021 to 31 July 2021. To determine the relationship between several variables and the positive sentiment (attitude) towards vaccines, we run various models, including POLS, Panel Fixed Effects and Instrumental Variables estimations. Our results show that more information about vaccines' safety and the expected side effects are needed to increase positive attitudes towards vaccines. Additionally, government procurement and the vaccine rollout should improve. Accessibility to the vaccine should be a priority, and a collective effort should be made to increase positive messaging about the vaccine, especially on social media. The results of this study contribute to the understanding of the emotional challenges associated with vaccine uptake and inform policymakers, health workers, and stakeholders who communicate to the public during infectious disease outbreaks. Additionally, the global fight against COVID-19 might be lost if the attitude towards vaccines is not improved.

Dataset Information

Vaccine nationalism among the public: A cross-country experimental evidence of own-country bias towards COVID-19 vaccination.

Publications

Vaccine nationalism among the public: A cross-country experimental evidence of own-country bias towards COVID-19 vaccination.

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