An unmet global agenda: COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among farmers in Northern Ghana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ghana became the first nation in Sub-Saharan Africa to receive the coronavirus vaccine; however, as of December 2023, only 44.3% of Ghanaians had received at least two doses of COVID-19 vaccines, with vaccine hesitancy reported at 52.2%. This research aimed to explore the reasons for COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among farmers in Northern Ghana. The study adopted a concurrent embedded mixed methods design, which simultaneously collects qualitative and quantitative data. Participants were purposively sampled from five farmer-based organizations. Twenty-four participants were interviewed for 30–45 min. The transcripts were imported into NVivo version 14 and analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis. The farmers’ interviews revealed five themes related to vaccine hesitancy: availability and access, misconceptions about the COVID-19 virus, preference for a single-dose vaccine, COVID-19 vaccine safety concerns, and belief in the non-existence of COVID-19 in Northern Ghana. Farmers’ perspectives on the COVID-19 vaccine varied in the quantitative findings. Approximately 37.5% (n = 9) would postpone and 16.7% (n = 4) would decline the COVID-19 vaccination. About 12.5% (n = 3) expressed some degree of positivity toward the vaccines, while 58.3% (n = 14) stated that COVID-19 was currently unimportant. Vaccine uptake in Northern Ghana among farmers most likely stalled due to a lack of information and the belief that the virus no longer exists. The findings highlight the intersecting reasons for vaccine hesitancy from logistical barriers to social and cultural beliefs. To address this, it is crucial to make single-dose vaccines more available, conduct ongoing public health campaigns, and prioritize farmers as a vulnerable population during health emergencies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".