COVID-19 vaccine uptake among clinical medical students in Enugu, Nigeria

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic shook the world, claimed a lot of lives, incapacitated many, and forced majority of the world into a lockdown. Vaccination is the key strategy to tackling the virus. Objectives: To ascertain the level of vaccination and the difficulties associated with vaccination, among clinical medical students in Enugu, South-East Nigeria. Materials and Methods: A multistage sampling was used to select 160 respondents while questionnaires (hard and soft copy) were administered to the participants. The IBM Statistical Package for the Social Sciences was used for data entry and data analysis. Results: There was a poor (16.3%) knowledge, negative perception (66.3%), and poor uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine (20.6%). There were statistically significant relationships between vaccination status, knowledge of vaccine, age, and perception of the vaccine (P = 0.000) as well as between level of training and vaccine perception (P = 0.03). Conclusion: There was very low level of COVID-19 vaccination in the study population that may be attributable to the low knowledge of the vaccine and the high negative perception. The rush to development of the vaccine, possible side effects, and possible long-term complications may be contributory to the poor uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine among the study respondents.