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. 2021 Dec 7;9(12):1445.
doi: 10.3390/vaccines9121445.

Factors Associated with COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy among Visible Minority Groups from a Global Context: A Scoping Review

Candy Ochieng  1 , Sabrita Anand  1 , George Mutwiri  1 , Michael Szafron  1 , Khrisha Alphonsus  1
Affiliations

Factors Associated with COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy among Visible Minority Groups from a Global Context: A Scoping Review

Candy Ochieng et al. Vaccines (Basel). .

Abstract

Vaccine hesitancy is one of the top ten greatest threats to global health. During the COVID-19 era, vaccine hesitancy poses substantial risks, especially in visible minorities, who are disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Although evidence of vaccine hesitancy exists, there is minimal focus on visible minorities and the reasons for hesitancy in this group are unclear. Identifying these populations and their reasons for vaccine hesitancy is crucial in improving vaccine uptake and curbing the spread of COVID-19. This scoping review follows a modified version of the Arksey and O'Malley strategy. Using comprehensive search strategies, advanced searches were conducted on Medline, CINAHL, and PubMed databases to acquire relevant articles. Full-text reviews using inclusion and exclusion criteria were performed to extract themes of vaccine hesitancy. Themes were grouped into factors using thematic qualitative analysis and were objectively confirmed by principal component analysis (PCA). To complement both analyses, a word cloud of titles and abstracts for the final articles was generated. This study included 71 articles. Themes were grouped into 8 factors and the top 3 recurring factors were safety and effectiveness of the vaccine, mistrust, and socioeconomic characteristics. Shedding light on these factors could help mitigate health inequities and increase overall vaccine uptake worldwide through interventions and policies targeted at these factors. Ultimately, this would help achieve global herd immunity.

Keywords: COVID-19; public health; vaccine acceptance; vaccine concerns; vaccine hesitancy; vaccine intentions; vaccines; visible minority.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Flowchart depicting the steps taken to identify the relevant articles to be used for data extraction in our scoping review.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Word cloud displaying 100 of the most frequent words in the titles and abstracts of the 71 final set of articles.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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