Vaccine Hesitancy among Medical Students at a Tertiary Hospital-Affiliated Medical School

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused a global pandemic with long-lasting economic and cultural impacts. International governments have attempted to scale up vaccine production to mitigate this crisis. However, vaccine hesitancy, particularly among healthcare providers, remains an understudied subject that may hinder vaccine effectiveness.

We performed a cross-sectional study to evaluate vaccine hesitancy among medical students using a pre-validated survey based on the 5C model of psychological antecedents, which includes confidence, complacency, constraints, calculation, and collective responsibility.

The majority of medical students had high scores for confidence (79.7%), non-complacency (88%), and not having constraints against receiving the COVID-19 vaccine (97.4%). Surprisingly, students had low scores for calculation (38%) and collective responsibility (14.7%). Many predictors of the psychological antecedents included in the 5C model have been reported, including academic year and gender.

We observed moderate levels of vaccine hesitancy among the medical students included in our study. We urge medical students to be more aware of community public health concerns. We recommend that authorized institutions lay out urgent reforms to increase awareness of COVID-19 and available vaccines.