Understanding Physician COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy: Politics, Race, and Rurality

• In Event: Public Opinion and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States continues largely unabated, infecting thousands of Americans each day. Scientists and policymakers have pinned their hopes to end the pandemic on the widespread adoption of the COVID-19 vaccine. In this vaccination process, they are counting on physicians and other frontline health care workers to be the first in line to vaccinate and then to play a vital role in encouraging other Americans to vaccinate as well. Unfortunately, due to politicization surrounding ‘operation warp speed’ and the unprecedented speed of COVID-19 vaccine development, large proportions of frontline health care workers have refused to vaccinate, mirroring hesitancy seen in the general public. Given the importance of protecting frontline health care workers against COVID-19 and their role in convincing others to vaccinate, it is critical to understand which frontline health care workers are reluctant to vaccinate, their reasons for hesitancy, and strategies that could be effective in improving their intention to vaccinate.
Our research serves as an important first step towards answering these questions. We rely on an original survey of 700 primary care physicians and analyze the correlates of physician COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and the reasons that physicians are reluctant to vaccinate. Our findings suggest that political ideology plays an important role in physician behavior, with conservative physicians significantly less likely to be willing to vaccinate against COVID-19. Furthermore, we find evidence that Black physicians and physicians from rural areas are more likely to be hesitant. When analyzing reasons for vaccine hesitancy, we find that physicians are most concerned about the vaccine’s safety, with non-trivial proportions of physicians also opting out due to concerns about effectiveness, a lack of trust in government, and not wanting to be the first to vaccinate. We conclude our manuscript by discussing the implications of our findings for efforts to end the pandemic and by discussing how our findings might guide the development of communication strategies focused on improving physician intention to vaccinate against COVID-19.

Authors

• Timothy Herbert Callaghan, Texas A&M University

• Robert Kirby Goidel, Texas A&M

• David J Washburn, Texas A&M University School of Public Health