COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in a Rural Primary Care Setting

Richard Terry; Aeman Asrar; Samantha Lavertue

doi:10.7759/cureus.27196

COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in a Rural Primary Care Setting

Cureus. 2022 Jul 24;14(7):e27196. doi: 10.7759/cureus.27196. eCollection 2022 Jul.

Authors

Richard Terry^{1

2}, Aeman Asrar², Samantha Lavertue¹

Affiliations

¹ Family Medicine, Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, Elmira, USA.
² Family Medicine, Arnot Health, Elmira, USA.

Abstract

As the United States clamors with anti-vax protests, researchers seek to understand what social and behavioral values are keeping patients from electing to vaccinate themselves against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) virus. Over the past year, the race to vaccinate has become less about developing working vaccines and more about finding ways to encourage vaccine uptake. This paper examines the question of vaccine hesitancy in rural Chemung County, NY. In identifying various psychosocial barriers to patient vaccination, which we hypothesize will be mostly political, we seek to understand the local mindset in the hope that our data guide the way to change it.

Keywords: community health & primary health care research; community survey; coronavirus disease 2019; covid-19; covid-19 vaccine; rural area; vaccine hesitancy.