Vaccinating children against SARS-CoV-2 - parents' attitude

Even though society wants to eradicate the pandemic of SARS-CoV-2, people are distrustful of the vaccination program, especially regarding children. Moreover, parents are becoming increasingly skeptical about vaccinating their children.

This study aims to identify the reasons for this distrust and thus discover novel ways to raise societal awareness of the importance of vaccination.

The study was based on the results of an online questionnaire survey prepared by the authors and conducted in Poland. The survey was addressed to parents of children aged 5-11.

The study recruited 1263 parents of children aged 5-11 who completed the questionnaire correctly. Among those, 34.28 % confirmed that they did or planned to vaccinate their children. More than half of the responders were parents who declared that they had not vaccinated their children and would not do that in the future (52.02 %), whereas 13.7 % of parents had not yet decided whether they would vaccinate their children. Parents who declared their children were not vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 exhibited a predisposition to highly negative attitudes towards vaccination in general, which negated their safety and efficacy. The majority (73.93 %) of those non-vaccinating parents believed that vaccines endanger the health and life of children. Some also feared severe adverse reactions (33.84 %) and expressed that it would be better for children to be immunized by getting over the disease (28.05 %).

Negative opinions about vaccinating children against SARS-CoV-2 derive from misunderstanding the immune system mechanisms and the vaccination purpose. For this reason, information regarding the safety and value of the COVID-19 vaccine and vaccines in general should be more widely publicized.