Background and aim: The importance of immunization has increased even more during the pandemic. This study aimed to evaluate the reasons for healthcare professionals not being vaccinated against COVID-19 and to develop solutions for the causes.
Subject and methods: This qualitative study was carried out with in-depth interviews between July 2021 and October 2021, with 32 healthcare professionals and five key people who had never been vaccinated against COVID-19.
Results: The most common reasons that healthcare professionals were not vaccinated against COVID-19 were concerns about vaccine side effects, believing that the vaccine is not effective, distrust of the vaccine content and COVID-19 treatment methods, the rapid production of the vaccine, the fact that the vaccine is produced with a new technology, thinking that the vaccine is not the definitive solution, seeing themselves as healthy and young, and the belief that they would have a mild case of the disease and recover. The main themes were COVID-19 vaccine-related reasons, individual reasons/group effects, contextual reasons, and vaccination-related general issues. The main sub-themes were vaccine production, distrust, risk perception, policies and infodemic.
Conclusion: It has been seen that the uncertainty, infodemic, and insecurity that emerged especially during the pandemic period are related to each other. As knowledge and awareness about the disease increase, there is an increase in risk perception. For this reason, social information studies should be increased and physicians should be enabled to use media tools more effectively.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10389-023-01822-7.
Keywords: COVID-19 vaccines; Healthcare professional; Pandemic; Qualitative; Vaccine hesitation.
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