Examining determinants of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in Togo

Abstract

This policy brief analyses data collected in Togo shortly before vaccines were officially approved. We conducted a nationally representative telephone survey in Togo (N = 1,558) throughout December 2020, prior to COVID-19 vaccines arriving in Togo.

In our analyses, we operationalised vaccine hesitancy as respondents who answered ‘no’ and ‘I don’t know’ to the question: “When a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available to you, would you like to get vaccinated?”

Rates of vaccine hesitancy was fairly high, with 67.7% of the Togolese respondents said that they were willing to be vaccinated against COVID-19 when offered the opportunity, 25.7% said they were not, and 6.6% were undecided.

Among the 25.7% of respondents who reported unwillingness to be vaccinated, we asked further questions about their reasons for this. Within this hesitant population, reasons included believing the vaccine to be dangerous (90.6%), government mistrust (40.7%), pharmaceutical mistrust (15.6%), believing that COVID-19 is not severe enough (7.8%), and other reasons such as not having enough information about the vaccine (25.5%).

We hope that our findings provide useful insight into the socioeconomic and psychological factors associated with COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in Togo.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Ken Brackstone: orcid.org/0000-0002-6882-3260

ORCID for Michael Head: orcid.org/0000-0003-1189-0531

Catalogue record

Export record

Altmetrics