Widespread acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines is crucial for achieving sufficient immunization coverage to end the global pandemic, yet few studies have investigated COVID-19 vaccination attitudes in lower-income countries, where large-scale vaccination is just beginning. We analyze COVID-19 vaccine acceptance across 15 survey samples covering 10 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Asia, Africa and South America, Russia (an upper-middle-income country) and the United States, including a total of 44,260 individuals. We find considerably higher willingness to take a COVID-19 vaccine in our LMIC samples (mean 80.3%; median 78%; range 30.1 percentage points) compared with the United States (mean 64.6%) and Russia (mean 30.4%). Vaccine acceptance in LMICs is primarily explained by an interest in personal protection against COVID-19, while concern about side effects is the most common reason for hesitancy. Health workers are the most trusted sources of guidance about COVID-19 vaccines. Evidence from this sample of LMICs suggests that prioritizing vaccine distribution to the Global South should yield high returns in advancing global immunization coverage. Vaccination campaigns should focus on translating the high levels of stated acceptance into actual uptake. Messages highlighting vaccine efficacy and safety, delivered by healthcare workers, could be effective for addressing any remaining hesitancy in the analyzed LMICs.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/236517/1/Full-text-article-Solis-Arce-et-al-COVID-19-vaccine.pdf

COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and hesitancy in low- and middle-income countries.

Confidence and Receptivity for COVID-19 Vaccines: A Rapid Systematic Review

BACKGROUND: Vaccine hesitancy poses serious challenges for achieving coverage for population immunity. It is necessary to achieve high COVID-19 vaccination acceptance rates and medical students' coverage as future health care providers. The study aimed to explore the level of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and determine the factors and barriers that may affect vaccination decision-making. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was carried out among medical students in Tanta and Kafrelsheikh Universities, Egypt. Data collection was done via an online questionnaire during January 2021 from 2133 students. RESULTS: The majority of the participant students (90.5%) perceived the importance of the COVID-19 vaccine, 46% had vaccination hesitancy, and an equal percentage (6%) either definitely accepted or refused the vaccine. Most of the students had concerns regarding the vaccine's adverse effects (96.8%) and ineffectiveness (93.2%). The most confirmed barriers of COVID-19 vaccination were deficient data regarding the vaccine's adverse effects (potential 74.17% and unknown 56.31%) and insufficient information regarding the vaccine itself (72.76%). CONCLUSION: The government, health authority decision-makers, medical experts, and universities in Egypt need to work together and make efforts to reduce hesitancy and raise awareness about vaccinations, consequently improving the acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/jmv.26910

Vaccine hesitancy: Beliefs and barriers associated with COVID-19 vaccination among Egyptian medical students.

Background: Vaccination is a cornerstone of the prevention of communicable infectious diseases; however, vaccines have traditionally met with public fear and hesitancy, and COVID-19 vaccines are no exception. Social media use has been demonstrated to play a role in the low acceptance of vaccines.
Objective: The aim of this study is to identify the topics and sentiments in the public COVID-19 vaccine–related discussion on social media and discern the salient changes in topics and sentiments over time to better understand the public perceptions, concerns, and emotions that may influence the achievement of herd immunity goals.
Methods: Tweets were downloaded from a large-scale COVID-19 Twitter chatter data set from March 11, 2020, the day the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, to January 31, 2021. We used R software to clean the tweets and retain tweets that contained the keywords vaccination, vaccinations, vaccine, vaccines, immunization, vaccinate, and vaccinated. The final data set included in the analysis consisted of 1,499,421 unique tweets from 583,499 different users. We used R to perform latent Dirichlet allocation for topic modeling as well as sentiment and emotion analysis using the National Research Council of Canada Emotion Lexicon.
Results: Topic modeling of tweets related to COVID-19 vaccines yielded 16 topics, which were grouped into 5 overarching themes. Opinions about vaccination (227,840/1,499,421 tweets, 15.2%) was the most tweeted topic and remained a highly discussed topic during the majority of the period of our examination. Vaccine progress around the world became the most discussed topic around August 11, 2020, when Russia approved the world’s first COVID-19 vaccine. With the advancement of vaccine administration, the topic of instruction on getting vaccines gradually became more salient and became the most discussed topic after the first week of January 2021. Weekly mean sentiment scores showed that despite fluctuations, the sentiment was increasingly positive in general. Emotion analysis further showed that trust was the most predominant emotion, followed by anticipation, fear, sadness, etc. The trust emotion reached its peak on November 9, 2020, when Pfizer announced that its vaccine is 90% effective.
Conclusions: Public COVID-19 vaccine–related discussion on Twitter was largely driven by major events about COVID-19 vaccines and mirrored the active news topics in mainstream media. The discussion also demonstrated a global perspective. The increasingly positive sentiment around COVID-19 vaccines and the dominant emotion of trust shown in the social media discussion may imply higher acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines compared with previous vaccines.

/pdf/covid-19-vaccine-related-discussion-on-twitter-topic-46erhnbkzr.pdf

COVID-19 Vaccine-Related Discussion on Twitter: Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact daily life, including health system operations, despite the availability of vaccines that are effective in greatly reducing the risks of death and severe disease. Misperceptions of COVID-19 vaccine safety, efficacy, risks, and mistrust in institutions responsible for vaccination campaigns have been reported as factors contributing to vaccine hesitancy. This study investigated COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy globally in June 2021. Nationally representative samples of 1,000 individuals from 23 countries were surveyed. Data were analyzed descriptively, and weighted multivariable logistic regressions were used to explore associations with vaccine hesitancy. Here, we show that more than three-fourths (75.2%) of the 23,000 respondents report vaccine acceptance, up from 71.5% one year earlier. Across all countries, vaccine hesitancy is associated with a lack of trust in COVID-19 vaccine safety and science, and skepticism about its efficacy. Vaccine hesitant respondents are also highly resistant to required proof of vaccination; 31.7%, 20%, 15%, and 14.8% approve requiring it for access to international travel, indoor activities, employment, and public schools, respectively. For ongoing COVID-19 vaccination campaigns to succeed in improving coverage going forward, substantial challenges remain to be overcome. These include increasing vaccination among those reporting lower vaccine confidence in addition to expanding vaccine access in low- and middle-income countries. 

/pdf/revisiting-covid-19-vaccine-hesitancy-around-the-world-using-3a2ho8dv.pdf

Revisiting COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy around the world using data from 23 countries in 2021

Despite major advances in vaccination over the past century, resurgence of vaccine-preventable illnesses has led the World Health Organization to identify vaccine hesitancy as a major threat to global health. Vaccine hesitancy may be fueled by health information obtained from a variety of sources, including new media such as the Internet and social media platforms. As access to technology has improved, social media has attained global penetrance. In contrast to traditional media, social media allow individuals to rapidly create and share content globally without editorial oversight. Users may self-select content streams, contributing to ideological isolation. As such, there are considerable public health concerns raised by anti-vaccination messaging on such platforms and the consequent potential for downstream vaccine hesitancy, including the compromise of public confidence in future vaccine development for novel pathogens, such as SARS-CoV-2 for the prevention of COVID-19. In this review, we discuss the current position of social media platforms in propagating vaccine hesitancy and explore next steps in how social media may be used to improve health literacy and foster public trust in vaccination.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21645515.2020.1780846

Social media and vaccine hesitancy: new updates for the era of COVID-19 and globalized infectious diseases.

With the advancements in the information and communication technology (ICT) and acceptance to Industry 4.0 standards, it has become indispensable for the companies, especially export firms to replace their domestic accounting standards with "International Financial Reporting Standards" (IFRS), India is not an exception. With the conversion of rules- based on a principal-based set of accounting standards, it has become essential for both the education planners and educators to incorporate IFRS in the curriculum with respect to industry 4.0. The data has been analyzed with respect to the requirements of the adoption of IFRS. The data has been collected from the respondents pursuing chartered accountants and budding professionals in the field of accounting & finance through the questionnaire. This study is an attempt to examine the impact of extent of introducing IFRS in the accounting curriculum and its learning outcome.

Enabling Analytics for the Global IFRS Adoption and Industry 4.0

ABSTRACT The banking system has evolved with time. Earlier, the banks maintained the storage and counting of coins, but the storage was not safe. Then started the concept of lending with interest. The banking system has completely revolutionised the system, and made it easier to transact online. In this study, the main aim is to understand the banking services and how it impacts the level of satisfaction. To conduct the study, a questionnaire was circulated, containing two sections. The first section contains a set of 16 questions containing demographic- and services-related question. Section 2 contains 24 questions, showing a Likert scale to measure the level of satisfaction of the customers. One hundred ten customers of State Bank of India, SBI Branch Gurgaon and Haryana responded to the questionnaire. Different tools such as factor analysis and reliability tests were conducted to find out the relationship between customer behaviour and banking services.

A sustainable banking services analysis and its effect on customer satisfaction

The COVID-19 pandemic had a tremendous impact on the energy sector because of demand factor. Volatility has emerged as a major concern in the energy industry and COVID-19 has cast a dark shadow over this characteristic. We predict the symmetrical and asymmetric volatility of energy market in India and USA during COVID-19 outbreak tenure. The energy market is proxied by crude oil and natural gas of these two countries. For an empirical estimation, standard generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (s-GARCH) and exponential GARCH (e-GARCH) are employed based on daily observations spanning from March 25, 2020 to January 31, 2022. The result reveals that new information is captured and there is volatility persistence in both Indian and US energy markets. The conditional volatility decays over the time of these markets since it is backed by mean reversion and Indian energy market decays fast comparatively. Additionally, it depicts that there is no leverage effect in both Indian and US energy markets. This study furnishes an insight to the investors and portfolio managers with respect to risk prediction considering impact of good and bad news.

Neha Puri

Papers

Social media and vaccine hesitancy: new updates for the era of COVID-19 and globalized infectious diseases.

Enabling Analytics for the Global IFRS Adoption and Industry 4.0

A sustainable banking services analysis and its effect on customer satisfaction

Predicting the Symmetric and Asymmetric Volatility of Energy Market: Evidence from COVID Outbreak in India and USA