South Africans are not vaccine hesitant – in fact, more than 71% of adults surveyed in the NIDS-CRAM Wave 4 study of Covid-19 impacts said they would get vaccinated if a jab was available.
“Relative to other countries then, vaccine acceptance is higher than recent estimates from the US and France, but lower than China, Brazil and the UK. The youth and those with only a primary school education were more likely to be vaccine hesitant,” write the survey’s principal researchers, Nic Spaull and Reza Daniels.
People with comorbidities those who are older were less likely to be vaccine hesitant.
“After controlling for income, education and other variables, race is not a significant predictor of vaccine hesitancy,” the researchers found. But Afrikaans-speaking South Africans were the most sceptical. “Forty-two percent of Afrikaans home language respondents were vaccine hesitant, much higher than the national average,” write Spaull and Daniels.