Covid-19 vaccines status, acceptance and hesitancy among maintenance hemodialysis patients : a cross-sectional study and the implications for Pakistan and beyond

Abstract

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy continues to be a widespread problem in Pakistan due to various conspiracy beliefs, myths and misconceptions. Since the hemodialysis population is at higher risk of contracting infections, we sought to investigate the current COVID-19 immunization status and reasons for any vaccine hesitancy among these patients in Pakistan. This cross-sectional study was conducted among maintenance hemodialysis patients at six hospitals of Punjab Province of Pakistan. Data were collected anonymously using a questionnaire. 399 hemodialysis patients took part in the survey, the majority of them were male (56%) and aged 45 – 64 years. 62.4% of the patients reported receiving at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine. Of those vaccinated (249), 73.5% had received two dose and 16.9% had received a booster dose. The most common reasons for vaccination were “being aware they were at high risk” (89.6%), “fear of getting infected” (89.2%) and “willingness to fight against COVID-19 pandemic” (83.9%). Of the 150 patients who had not yet been vaccinated, only 10 showed willingness to take the COVID-19 vaccine. The major reasons for refusal included “COVID-19 is not a real problem” (75%), “corona vaccine is a con-spiracy (72.1%)” and “I don’t need the vaccine” (60.7%). Our study revealed that only 62% pa-tients receiving hemodialysis were partially or completely vaccinated against COVID-19. Con-sequently, there is a need to initiate aggressive approaches to educate this high-risk population in order to address their vaccine safety and efficacy concerns and correct current myths and mis-conceptions to improve the COVID-19 immunization status in this population.

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© 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines11050904 10.3390/vaccines11050904

Repository URI

https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/85308/