Awareness and Attitudes toward COVID-19 Vaccinations: A Cross-Sectional Study in Dharwad, Karnataka, India

Abstract

A peculiar new disease, COVID-19 affecting the lungs, causing cough, and difficulty in breathing, has affected people in most countries. The disease, first noticed in the Wuhan province, moved to the entire world in a short period. There were a large number of people with mild symptoms, some with severe forms of the disease, and some in very severe stage, resulting in their death. In total, 425 million people suffered, 351 million fully recovered, and 6 million died worldwide. This sudden disease crisis has united every one across the globe to control and minimize the severity of the disease. Toward this goal, scientists, doctors, and researchers are engaged with studies on the disease, disease-causing viruses, treatment regimen, and some other developed vaccines to prevent the illness. In a routine standard procedure, inventing a new drug or vaccine takes a few years from thought to clinical trials. However, in the present day, technology has advanced so much that it has come up with answers in a short time. That is how we have a few vaccines against COVID-19 disease ready for use in an emergency. In all these ventures, strict procedures, protocols, ethical considerations, and regulatory requirements have been adhered to and only upon such satisfaction they have been released for use in the population. The governments have taken a decision to use these vaccines on their people. They have made widely dispersed information about vaccines available to people through popular media. The questions can be numerous: “has this information reached the grassroots level, have people understood the benefits and risks, is the information adequate to make informed consent to take the vaccines, whowill receive the vaccines first, given the limited supply.” There is a need for studies on all these issues from different parts of the geography, different culture, different ethnicity cutting across borders. The situation is peculiar, vaccine put up in short period, launched nationwide, what in the event of adverse side effects, what if sizeable population refuse vaccination? In any given scenario, there are persons with advanced age, disability, chronic disease, dependency internet surfers, rumor mongers, atheists who may flatly refuse to take the vaccine. If such persons are influential, they may induce others not to take the shots. In our observation of a group of health workers, few 1% refused fully, 5% pretended with lame excuse to take vaccine, and 12% were undecided. The Internet is a great leveler, and social media is rich with many experiences. In this context, one such effort in this direction is to identify the level of awareness and extent of attitude toward COVID-19 vaccinations in Northern Karnataka. There are studies from Bangladesh, the UAE, the Middle East region, Africa, and Europe suggesting adequate knowledge and a hostile attitude toward COVID-19 vaccines.1–8 We proposed and obtained permission for this study from our Institutional Research committee [IRC23/April2021]. We conducted a cross-sectional study from July to September,