COVID-19 in Europe: new challenges for addressing vaccine hesitancy

Emilie Karafillakis, Pierre Van Damme, Greet Hendrickx, Heidi J Larson
The Lancet Comment, February 03, 2022.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the roll-out of multiple new COVID-19 vaccines worldwide has brought global attention to the challenge of vaccine hesitancy, and it has also exposed new dynamics around routine vaccine confidence. European populations were recognised as being among the least vaccine confident in the world in 2016, with France being identified as the most vaccine sceptical.1 Although trends over the past 5 years have shown that some countries have become more vaccine confident over time, other countries, such as Hungary and Romania, have become less confident over time.2 Although some of these trends can explain the varying levels of confidence in COVID-19 vaccines,3 the issues around the acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines present new challenges.

Read the full comment in The Lancet.

COVID-19 in Europe: new challenges for addressing vaccine hesitancy