COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy: Vaccination intention and attitudes of community health volunteers in Kenya

Joachim Osur; Evelyne Muinga; Jane Carter; Shiphrah Kuria; Salim Hussein; Edward Mugambi Ireri

doi:10.1371/journal.pgph.0000233

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy: Vaccination intention and attitudes of community health volunteers in Kenya

PLOS Glob Public Health. 2022 Mar 16;2(3):e0000233. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0000233. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Joachim Osur^{1

2}, Evelyne Muinga², Jane Carter², Shiphrah Kuria², Salim Hussein³, Edward Mugambi Ireri^{1

4}

Affiliations

¹ Amref International University, Nairobi, Kenya.
² Amref Health Africa Headquarters, Nairobi, Kenya.
³ Ministry of Health, Nairobi, Kenya.
⁴ Smart Health Consultants Limited Company, Nairobi, Kenya.

Abstract

In Kenya, community health volunteers link the formal healthcare system to urban and rural communities and advocate for and deliver healthcare interventions to community members. Therefore, understanding their views towards COVID-19 vaccination is critical to the country's successful rollout of mass vaccination. The study aimed to determine vaccination intention and attitudes of community health volunteers and their potential effects on national COVID-19 vaccination rollout in Kenya. This cross-sectional study involved community health volunteers in four counties: Mombasa, Nairobi, Kajiado, and Trans-Nzoia, representing two urban and two rural counties, respectively. COVID-19 vaccination intention among community health volunteers was 81% (95% CI: 0.76-0.85). On individual binary logistic regression level, contextual influence: trust in vaccine manufacturers (adjOR = 2.25, 95% CI: 1.06-4.59; p = 0.030); individual and group influences: trust in the MoH (adjOR = 2.12, 90% CI: 0.92-4.78; p = 0.073); belief in COVID-19 vaccine safety (adjOR = 3.20, 99% CI: 1.56-6.49; p = 0.002), and vaccine safety and issues: risk management by the government (adjOR = 2.46, 99% CI: 1.32-4.56; p = 0.005) and vaccine concerns (adjOR = 0.81, 90% CI: 0.64-1.01; p = 0.064), were significantly associated with vaccination intention. Overall, belief in COVID-19 vaccine safety (adjOR = 2.04, 90% CI: 0.92-4.47 p = 0.076) and risk management by the government (adjOR = 1.86, 90% CI: 0.94-3.65; p = 0.072) were significantly associated with vaccination intention. Overall vaccine hesitancy among community health volunteers in four counties in Kenya was 19% (95% CI: 0.15-0.24), ranging from 10.2-44.6% across the counties. These pockets of higher hesitancy are likely to negatively impact national vaccine rollout and future COVID-19 vaccination campaigns. The determinants of hesitancy arise from contextual, individual and group, and vaccine or vaccination specific concerns, and vary from county to county.

Copyright: © 2022 Osur et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Grants and funding

The funding source was American Tower Corporation. https://atckenya.ke/en/index.html. All authors were beneficiaries of the grant. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. No authors received a salary from the funders. This grant does not have a funding number. It was a donation from a corporation, which was not won through a competitive process, so there’s not even a call for proposals (or something like that) and thus no grant number.