COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance and Uptake in Bangkok, Thailand: Cross-sectional Online Survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The third most severe COVID-19 wave in the middle of 2021 coincided with the dual challenges of limited vaccine supply and lagging acceptance in Bangkok, Thailand. Understanding of persistent vaccine hesitancy during the "608" campaign to vaccinate those aged over 60 years and 8 medical risk groups was needed. On-the-ground surveys place further demands on resources and are scale limited. We leveraged the University of Maryland COVID-19 Trends and Impact Survey (UMD-CTIS), a digital health survey conducted among daily Facebook user samples, to fill this need and inform regional vaccine rollout policy. OBJECTIVE: The aims of this study were to characterize COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, frequent reasons for hesitancy, mitigating risk behaviors, and the most trusted sources of COVID-19 information through which to combat vaccine hesitancy in Bangkok, Thailand during the 608 vaccine campaign. METHODS: We analyzed 34,423 Bangkok UMD-CTIS responses between June and October 2021, coinciding with the third COVID-19 wave. Sampling consistency and representativeness of the UMD-CTIS respondents were evaluated by comparing distributions of demographics, 608 priority groups, and vaccine uptake over time with source population data. Estimates of vaccine hesitancy in Bangkok and 608 priority groups were tracked over time. Frequently cited hesitancy reasons and trusted information sources were identified according to the 608 group and degree of hesitancy. Kendall tau was used to test statistical associations between vaccine acceptance and vaccine hesitancy. RESULTS: The Bangkok UMD-CTIS respondents had similar demographics over weekly samples and compared to the Bangkok source population. Respondents self-reported fewer pre-existing health conditions compared to census data overall but had a similar prevalence of the important COVID-19 risk factor diabetes. UMD-CTIS vaccine uptake rose in parallel with national vaccination statistics, while vaccine hesitancy and degree of hesitancy declined (-7% hesitant per week). Concerns about vaccination side effects (2334/3883, 60.1%) and wanting to wait and see (2410/3883, 62.1%) were selected most frequently, while "not liking vaccines" (281/3883, 7.2%) and "religious objections" (52/3883, 1.3%) were selected least frequently. Greater vaccine acceptance was associated positively with wanting to "wait and see" and negatively with "don't believe I need (the vaccine)" (Kendall tau 0.21 and -0.22, respectively; adjusted P<.001). Scientists and health experts were most frequently cited as trusted COVID-19 information sources (13,600/14,033, 96.9%), even among vaccine hesitant respondents. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings provide policy and health experts with evidence that vaccine hesitancy was declining over the study timeframe. Hesitancy and trust analyses among the unvaccinated support Bangkok policy measures to address vaccine safety and efficacy concerns through health experts rather than government or religious officials. Large-scale surveys enabled by existing widespread digital networks offer an insightful minimal-infrastructure resource for informing region-specific health policy needs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".