Murugesu was written by Jason Arunn.
A man gets a third injection of a vaccine.
Tomas Tkacik/SOPA Images
A study in the Czech Republic suggests that accurate information about the way doctors view covid-19 vaccines may reduce vaccine hesitancy. More people in the country received the vaccine after they were told that most doctors intended to get it.
The vaccine hesitancy was a major issue during the Pandemic. In the Czech Republic, about 64 per cent of people have had two doses of a coronaviruses vaccine, which is higher than the global average. The Czech Republic has one of the highest death tolls per capita in the world.
Two months after covid-19 jabs began to be rolled out in the country, Vojtch Barto and his colleagues surveyed 2501 people in the Czech Republic. The participants were from all over the country.
People were asked to estimate the percentage of doctors who would recommend the vaccine to their patients.
The media discourse surrounding the vaccine at the time may have given a skewed idea of what doctors thought about the jabs.
The Czech Republic has a similar level of faith in its doctors as the global average, which is why the team chose to study it.
The researchers found that about 60 per cent of the participants believed that Czech doctors would recommend the vaccine to their patients.
The results of a survey the team had done on doctors in the Czech Republic found that 90 percent of them planned to recommend the vaccine to their patients. The other half was not given this information.
We saw a huge mismatch between what the doctors told us and what the population thought. The researchers wanted to encourage participants in their study to get vaccine if they corrected the flawed understanding.
The participants were followed by researchers for nine months. Those who were told their true beliefs about vaccines were more likely to get vaccine than those who didn't.
The figure was stable over the last few months. There was a 4 per cent difference between the two groups when the participants were asked if they wanted to get a booster jab.
Barto says the findings show an easy and cheap way to get more people to bevaccinated.
He isn't sure if the results would be repeated in other countries.
It is an important finding according to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She says that it is striking that the effect of giving people the true statistics about the views of the Czech Republic's doctors persisted for a long time.
The journal Nature has a reference.
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