Understanding peoples’ fears about the vaccine

Rather than write off concerns about the vaccine as conspiracy theories, we spent time understanding what was behind these fears. The people we spoke to were parents, grandparents and frontline workers with huge incentives to become inoculated.

They have friends to meet, family to see and jobs to perform, but their genuine concerns about the vaccines are putting them at risk.

However they were all worried about the safety of the vaccine for people like them. Their previous experiences lead them to believe that their safety was unlikely to have been considered when developing the vaccines at such speed.

Impact

In order to measure impact, we surveyed 650 people across the six boroughs to benchmark attitudes towards vaccination before and after the Vaccine Facts campaign. The main outcomes were:

Increased vaccine confidence: The number of Black, Asian and ethnic minority people who said they would take the vaccine if offered increased from 76% to 86%

Increased vaccinations: Before the campaign, 77% of respondents were vaccinated, which rose to 87% after the campaign
– Black, Asian and minority ethnic increased from 64% to 83% vaccinated
– Religious respondents increased from 65% to 80% vaccinated

Vaccine hesitancy profile changed: Ethnicity is no longer a defining feature of resistance. Although the proportion of people who said they would not get the vaccine did not change significantly (from 15% to 12%), the proportion of black and ethnic minority respondents found in that group did.

One in four black and ethnic minority respondents were resistant before the campaign (24%) – falling significantly to 14% afterwards. In the pre-campaign survey, 45% of resistants had an ethnic minority background. By the time of the post-campaign survey, this had fallen significantly to 36%.

The insight that formed our content strategy

The following is a crucial piece of insight from a healthy 39-year-old mixed race woman, who took part in user research (edited for brevity).

“I have already been offered the vaccination but have turned it down. I would however like to clarify that I am not against vaccination in general. I’ve had all my vaccinations so far and so has my son. Whenever I go on holiday to countries that require certain vaccinations, I do so too.

“I also recognise that Covid-19 can be extremely dangerous for vulnerable groups. I have various people in my close circle outside of the vulnerable groups that contracted Covid-19 and who have been ill. Therefore, I’m not part of the people that doubt that Covid-19 is even real.

“My problem is that people like myself who are trying to do their own research but are against this vaccination are put in the same category as the real anti-vaccination groups. That then makes me feel even more against it because I don’t feel that my concerns are being taken seriously and feel like I’m almost being brushed off as a conspiracy theorist. And many people around me feel the same way.

“The main reasons I am against this vaccination are because of the lack of data on potential long-term side effects and the new vaccine technologies being used. And also because I feel that as someone outside of the vulnerable groups, I don’t feel a need to take a vaccine. I have never had a flu vaccine either and am hardly ever ill because I have a strong immune system. I feel that the risk of me getting seriously ill or dying from Covid-19 is way too small against the risks of the vaccine itself.

“Many Black people currently feel that they are being targeted when it comes to the Covid-19 vaccination. An often-repeated statement is ‘We are always last on the list for everything, let us be last now too’.”