Vaccine Hesitancy in a Global Pandemic: Behavioral Obstacles in COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake in the United States

Abstract

In March 2020, many states and counties in the United States were shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Over a year later in April 2021, we have seen this pandemic take the lives of over half a million Americans. With vaccines rolling out and slowly becoming available to more and more Americans as eligibility is expanded, there is hope that the country can return to normalcy soon—but only if a large proportion of the population decides to vaccinate against the disease. In this paper, I have laid the foundation for the historical relevance of vaccine hesitancy, the contexts of the COVID-19 vaccine expanding the vaccine hesitant group within the United States, and previous research on vaccine uptake and behavioral research that set up the methods of this paper. My four specific research questions, tested through surveys on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk are: 1) does omission bias play a role in this vaccination decision?, 2) where do people put their trust in recommendations for this vaccine?, 3) does the number of people that have contracted or been seriously ill or died from this vaccine increase the likelihood of vaccine uptake?, and finally 4) can the affect heuristic be used to influence vaccine uptake? The paper concludes that omission bias does not play a role in this vaccine decision, as we observed that participants rated imagined symptoms from contracting COVID-19 as worse than imagined COVID-19 vaccine symptoms—a finding much different than previous papers on omission bias and vaccine decisions. This paper also found that the affect heuristic was not present, where participants who received an anecdotal story of a young person dying of COVID-19 versus another group receiving statistics of the impact of COVID-19 in the U.S. had no statistical difference in intended vaccine uptake between the two groups. Participants who knew those who contracted the virus (up to 20 people), and those who knew someone who were seriously ill or died of COVID-19 or its complication were significantly more likely to intend to vaccinate than those who did not. Other findings included that Republicans were significantly less likely to intend to vaccinate against COVID-19 than Democrats, those who received the flu vaccine were much more likely to intend to vaccinate against COVID-19, participants accepted their general physician’s vaccine recommendation the most, amongst others. From these findings, this paper gives three policy recommendations for government and public health officials within the U.S. The first recommendation is to encourage the Republican party and right-leaning news programs to encourage viewers to vaccinate. The second is for government and public health officials to hold off on spreading information to the public until that information is proven factual in order to maintain public trust. The final recommendation, though intuitive, is for medical professionals to do all they can to encourage their patients to receive this vaccine.