In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination-induced behavioral complacency in adherence to COVID-19 appropriate behavior emerged as a significant concern. This study was conducted among a convenience sample of 540 oral health care professionals in India and the United States. This was a retrospective pretest-post-test design, a choice to eliminate response-shift bias, where the participants responded online on their adherence or otherwise to COVID-19 precautionary measures before and after vaccination. The difference between post-test and retrospective pretest scores was used in assessing the magnitude of complacency demonstrated by the individual as a function of getting vaccinated, and the process was validated using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with principal axis factoring and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on two randomly split subsets of the overall sample. It was observed that there had been a decline in the adherence to all the considered COVID-19 precautionary measures from the time before vaccination to the time of achievement of the fully vaccinated status. EFA performed on the randomly split sub sample of 240 subjects returned a two factor solution with five items in factor 1 and seven items in factor 2. Items in both the factors demonstrated adequate internal consistency in reliability analysis (Cronbach's alpha 0.84 and 0.82, respectively). The two factor solution obtained in EFA demonstrated good model fit in CFA [RMSEA (90%CI) - 0.077 (0.063-0.092); TLI - 0.872; CFI - 0.897; SRMR - 0.056]. These results highlight the vaccination-induced complacency in observing COVID-19 appropriate behavior among oral health professionals in India and the United States.
Keywords: Dentists; SARS-CoV-2; immunization; risk reduction behavior.