India: A vaccine hesitant or vaccine ignorant country

Nusrat Noor¹, Dewesh Kumar*², Vivek Kashyap³, Mahendra Singh⁴, Neelesh Kappoor⁵, Rishabh Kumar Rana⁶

^1,2,3,6 Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, RIMS, Ranchi, India

⁴ Department of Community Medicine and Family Medicine, AIIMS, Rishikesh, India

⁵ Team Lead – National RMNCH+A Unit (NRU), IPE Global Ltd, India

*Corresponding author: Dr. Dewesh Kumar, Dept. of PSM, RIMS, Ranchi, India. Email id: dr.dewesh@gmail.com, Phn no.: +917728960405

Background

The study attempts to assess the vaccine hesitancy regarding immunization in the rural areas of a tribal state in India considering the recent changes in Immunization.

Material and Methods

This community based cross-sectional study was a part of ICMR project done in a predominant tribal block of capital city of Jharkhand during April 2017 to September 2017. The sampling method used was cluster sampling in which one village cluster from seven randomly sampled subcentre was selected and in each cluster, 30 households having children under seven years of age were recruited making a total sample size of 210 in our study. The study tool contained qualitative questions which were assessed on Likert scale.

Results

Only 51.43% females were aware about the vaccines which their child has to get but only 15 % mothers were vaccine hesitant. More than 85% of the parents were satisfied with the information provided by health workers about vaccination and approximately 95% trust the information which is a good sign for Indian public health system that the trust in immunization is more than satisfactory.

Conclusion

From the findings of the study it may be concluded that parents are more vaccine ignorant rather than vaccine hesitant.

Acknowledgement

On behalf of my research team, I express my sincere gratitude to my postgraduate students and senior residents of my department who assisted during our research study.

Key words: Vaccine hesitancy, Vaccine Acceptance, Immunization, Cluster Sampling