Original article
Parental hesitancy towards vaccinating their children with a booster dose against COVID-19: Real-world evidence from Taizhou, China

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jiph.2022.08.002Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • A significant proportion of parents are hesitant to vaccinate their kids, even if they had been vaccinated themselves.

  • l Parents’disapproval of their children’s booster vaccination strongly influenced their vaccine-hesitancy.

  • Influenced by gender, mothers had a greater, statistically significant effect on vaccine-hesitancy than fathers.

  • Mothers should strengthen their attitude support for their children’s COVID-19 vaccine booster vaccination.

Abstract

Introduction

Parental vaccine-hesitancy can lead to delays or refusal to vaccinate children despite the availability of vaccines. This is a population-based, cross-sectional study investigating whether parents in China are hesitant to vaccinate their children with a COVID-19 vaccine booster.

Methods

Parents in Taizhou, China, responded to a self-reported online questionnaire on their hesitancy to vaccinate their children with a COVID-19 vaccine booster. Of the 1252 parents who were invited to answer the structured questionnaire, 514 (41.1%) samples had valid data for data analysis.

Results

A total of 41.8% of participants were hesitant to give their children a COVID-19 vaccine booster. After adjusting for confounders, parental gender (female vs. male parent, OR=0.56 95% CI: 0.32–0.87), parental opinion (yes vs. no, OR=0.17, 95% CI: 0.09–0.30), parental attitudes (yes vs. no, OR=0.28, 95% CI: 0.16–0.50), the presence of people around them who are generally hesitant to receive COVID-19 booster vaccines for children (yes vs. no, OR=0.14, 95%CI: 0.08–0.23), the individual hesitancy of people around them to administer booster COVID-19 vaccines to children (yes vs. no, OR=0.02, 95%CI: 0.02–0.22), and parents’ hesitancy to receive a booster vaccine for their children showed significant correlation. The disparity of factors related to booster vaccine-hesitancy for children between fathers and mothers was also found.

Conclusions

We found that a moderate proportion of parents reported that they were hesitant to give their children a COVID-19 vaccine booster. The results suggest that an in-depth, dynamic assessment and further health education planning are necessary to reduce Chinese parents’ hesitancy to vaccinate their children.

Keywords

Parental vaccine-hesitancy
COVID-19
Vaccine boosters
Children
China

Data Availability

All data underlying the findings are within the paper.

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1

These authors contributed equally to this work.