A study was conducted that included thousands of frontline health care workers in the United Arab Emirates. The study revealed that a big majority of them supported getting vaccinated against COVID-19, but one in ten are still doubtful.

The survey, ‘COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance among Health Care Workers in the United Arab Emirates’, is published in ScienceDirect. The researchers questioned 2,832 frontline workers, including physicians, nurses, pharmacists, dentists, in Abu Dhabi.

89.2 per cent health care workers said they would take a COVID-19 vaccine, while 88 percent had also advised family members to take the vaccine.

Across the different types of COVID-19 vaccines, 2192 (80.3 percent) of the participants in study preferred the inactivated type of vaccine (such as Sinovac, and Sinopharm), 708 (31.1 percent) chose the protein-based vaccine type (such as Novavax), 570 (25.2 percent) favored the virus vector vaccine type (such as Oxford-AstraZeneca and Sputnik V), and 538 (23.9 percent) preferred the genetic vaccine type (such as Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna).

When asked about the main reason for not getting vaccinated, of those who said they would not accept a vaccine (307 people - 10.8 percent), 144 (48.5 percent) said it was due to fear of potential side effects, 110 (37 percent) stated as lack of reliable vaccine data, 33 (11.1 percent) reported lack of trust in those creating and distributing the vaccine, and 10 (3.4 percent) responded that they doubted if the vaccine works.

Of those surveyed, 61 percent were women, while 69.9 percent were aged between 25 and 44 and half were nurses. Less than one in ten (7.9 percent) of the frontline health workers were from the GCC. Majority were either from the South Asian countries India or Pakistan (36.5 percent) or Southeast Asia (26.9 percent) nations like Malaysia or the Philippines.

The study was conducted between November 2020 and February 2021. Authors note that vaccine hesitancy could have reduced since the study took place a while ago and since then more information about vaccines have been made available.

“The high acceptance rate of the COVID-19 vaccine among HCWs in the UAE is reassuring. Approximately nine out of 10 respondents were willing to be vaccinated,” the authors said. “In comparison, studies conducted early in the COVID-19 pandemic, during the vaccine development phases, showed a much lower acceptance rate.”

“For example, in the US, 64 percent of HCWs were willing to be vaccinated within 30 days, 10 percent were willing to be vaccinated after six months, and 26 percent reported being unwilling to be vaccinated against COVID-19 even after six months of the initial rollout. Nevertheless, such rates of hesitancy towards the COVID-19 vaccine can change over time, and therefore it is essential to be studied.”

“In the UAE, incentives and policies were introduced to promote vaccination among HCWs and the general population with intensive awareness campaigns, which could contribute heavily to our finding of a high COVID-19 vaccine rate.”

The UAE made the COVID-19 vaccine available to frontline healthcare workers and essential government officials starting September 2020.

The UAE leads globally in vaccine distribution rate. 79.3 percent of its population has been fully vaccinated, with 78,651,247 coronavirus tests conducted. 90.5 per cent have received the first dose.