Longitudinal monitoring of Attitudes towards a VAccine against COVID-19. – SLAVACO

We will rely mainly on repeated cross-sectional surveys of the general French population, but we will combine them with other data: another quantitative survey carried out among French general practitioners in the fall of 2020, the evolution of the public's questions on Google between fall 2020 and fall 2021, and data collected on Twitter during the same period.
In addition, we will also conduct a survey of French general practitioners. We will use data collected from a national panel of 3,300 independent general practitioners established at the end of 2018. They were randomly selected from the National Register of French Health Professionals (Ministry of Health), stratified by age. , gender, medical density of their field of activity and their workload in 2018.

Finally, we will also collect data on Google and Twitter. First, throughout the life of the project, we will be monitoring Google queries for a COVID-19 vaccine. The study of query trends on Google has the advantage of working on the spontaneous behavior of people and of presenting a continuous flow of data entries allowing fine temporal comparisons.
A second type of analysis will be carried out on data linked to Twitter. Data mining techniques (retrieving content posted on Twitter) allow analysts to observe the interactions by which information is transmitted from one person to another as well as the role of media events and militant mobilizations in these processes. We will apply a variety of tools designed to understand the dynamics of persuasion that occur in such interactions, with a particular focus on how various policy actors engage with the COVID-19 vaccine issue and the communities they reach. achieve through their content.

The analysis of the data from the first survey is in progress but the first results are as follows (they were widely disseminated thanks to the writing of a note in the days following the data collection): 26.3% of respondents declared themselves unfavorable to the vaccination of adolescents (+2 points compared to May), 44% declared themselves unfavorable to the vaccination of 6-12 year olds (+8 points) and 57.1% declared themselves unfavorable to the vaccination of children under 6 years (+9 points).
This opinion is obviously highly correlated with attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccination, measured through vaccination intentions. Thus, those already vaccinated and those who intend to do so are much less unfavorable to vaccination for all these age groups. 51.7% of them are opposed to the vaccination of children under 6, 36.7% to that of 6-11 year olds and 16.5% to that of 12-17 year olds. These proportions are 83.7%, 80.8% and 77.5%, respectively, among those who do not intend to be vaccinated.
This reluctance is even stronger among parents whose children will be affected by this vaccination. Thus, 34.3% of parents of adolescents are against their vaccination, while this proportion is 65.5% among parents of children aged 6-12 and 82.2% among parents of children aged 6-12. less than 6 years old.

Vaccination intentions that continue to increase
At the time of the survey, 67.9% of respondents had been vaccinated with at least one dose and 15.5% did not intend to be vaccinated, which confirms the gradual decrease in the proportion of French people not wishing to be vaccinated. . By way of comparison, the COVIREIVAC survey conducted in mid-May indicated a 23% proportion of French people who did not intend to be vaccinated.
The social profile of those not intending to be vaccinated has changed little from May. The propensity to refuse vaccination against COVID-19 is much lower in people who feel close to the parties of the center and much higher in people who feel close to a radical right-wing party or no political party to whom they are concerned. 'add - new to the May survey - people feeling close to radical left and environmentalist parties. The political dimension of reluctance to be vaccinated therefore seems to be strengthening as the number of people who do not wish to be vaccinated decreases and in a context of strengthening of the health past. As in May, vaccination intentions increase with age (after 25 years), with level of education, and level of income. It is notable that the relative weakness of women's COVID-19 vaccination intentions remains insignificant with the integration of these different variables into the model (but more than in May).

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Résultats de traduction
Continue to carry out surveys and serialization thereof. ANR project submission on the perception of drugs more generally.

several papers under review

The development of vaccines against COVID-19 and their global access are a priority to control and hopefully end the current worldwide pandemic [1]. However, the success of this strategy strongly relies on people’s trust in this immunization: What if people refuse the shot? This is not a rhetorical question: the most recent studies found that 37% of the French population would refuse the vaccine. The main reason for this refusal was the fear that the vaccine would not be safe and refusal was strongly correlated to political attitudes. The objective of this project is to monitor the French population’s attitudes toward a COVID-19 vaccine during the next year, until, and if possible, after it is made available, as well as their evolution and their determinants (including socioeconomic status, attitudes toward science and health authorities but also vaccine-critical mobilisations), with a focus on their potential politicization. We assume that hostile attitudes toward this vaccine may reflect VH in specific groups of people, while in other groups, they may be rooted in anti-vaccination and/or conspiracy feelings. Moreover we will monitor whether such attitudes remain associated to political views, especially to the extremes of the political game.
We will mainly rely on repeated cross-sectional surveys conducted among the French general population. We plan to conduct five cross-sectional surveys among representative samples of the French adult (aged 18+) population according to the following design: first and last surveys with a quite long questionnaire in a sample of 2,000 participants, (months 0 & 12); three other surveys with a shorter questionnaire and a smaller sample (N=1,000; at months 3, 6 & 9). This original design is very likely to evolve, especially according to the epidemic and political context and the marketing of a future COVID-19 vaccine. We will combine these surveys with other data: another quantitative survey carried out among French GPs in the Fall of 2020 (n>3300) , the evolution of the public’s queries on Google between Fall 2020 and Fall 2021, and data collected on Twitter during the same period. The latter will enable to integrate the activist mobilizations that arise around the COVID-19 vaccine, how they politicize the vaccine and their respective capacity to reach a wide audience.
This project will involve a consortium of researchers with great experience of working on vaccine hesitancy. Our proposal fits primarily in the theme of Ethics & social dynamics, and it deals more particularly with representations, perceptions, attitudes, behaviors related to the epidemic. Moreover, our project will produce relevant knowledge to design politics aiming at improving the population’s willingness to get immunized against the COVID-19 and propensity of GPs to recommend it (theme Infection prevention and control).
Our project aims to combine operational objectives with longer-term scientific objectives. In the short term, the aim is to set up and make available to the authorities a monitoring of French population’s attitudes toward a vaccine against the COVID-19, as well as their determinants, in order to contribute to design strategies aiming at improving adherence to this vaccine, and to avoid the precedent of the vaccination campaign against H1N1 flu in 2009-2010. Regarding longer term scientific objectives, we expect this project will help us improve our knowledge and understanding of contemporary VH. Beyond VH, it will also contribute to the analysis of the contemporary shift toward the politicization of public health issues as well as the complexity of attitudes toward science.