Serrano-Alarcón, Manuel; Wang, Yuxi; Kentikelenis, Alexander; Mckee, Martin; Stuckler, David; (2023) The far-right and anti-vaccine attitudes: lessons from Spain's mass COVID-19 vaccine roll-out. European journal of public health, 33 (2). pp. 215-221. ISSN 1101-1262 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckac173
Permanent Identifier
Use this Digital Object Identifier when citing or linking to this resource.
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Far-right politicians in several countries have been vocal opponents of COVID-19 vaccination. But can this threaten vaccine roll-out? METHODS: We take advantage of repeated cross-sectional surveys with samples of around 3800 individuals across Spain conducted monthly from December 2020 to January 2022 (n = 51 294) to examine any association between far-right politics and vaccine hesitancy through the whole vaccine roll-out. RESULTS: Consistent with prior data, we found that far-right supporters were almost twice as likely to be vaccine-hesitant than the overall population in December 2020, before vaccines became available. However, with a successful vaccine roll out, this difference shrank, reaching non-significance by September 2021. From October 2021, however, vaccine hesitancy rebounded among this group at a time when the leadership of the far-right promoted a 'freedom of choice' discourse common among anti-vax supporters. By the latest month analysed (January 2022), far-right voters had returned to being twice as likely to be vaccine-hesitant and 7 percentage points less likely to be vaccinated than the general population. CONCLUSIONS: Our results are consistent with evidence that far-right politicians can encourage vaccine hesitancy. Nonetheless, we show that public attitudes towards vaccination are not immutable. Whereas a rapid and effective vaccine rollout can help to overcome the resistance of far-right voters to get vaccinated, they also seem to be susceptible to their party leader's discourse on vaccines.
Item Type | Article |
---|---|
Faculty and Department | Faculty of Public Health and Policy > Dept of Health Services Research and Policy |
Research Centre | Covid-19 Research |
PubMed ID | 36655519 |
Elements ID | 198149 |
Official URL | http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckac173 |
Download
Filename: Alarcon-etal-2023-The-far-right-and-anti.pdf
Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0
Download