Determinants of COVID-19 Vaccinations Among a State-Wide Year-Long Surveillance Initiative in a Conservative Southern State

By the end of 2021, COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in over 1/3 billion cases and more than 5 million deaths. It has brought public health responses to implement guidelines not always well received by the public, which challenges the successful prevention of disease spread. Vaccine hesitancy is one of the big barriers in pandemic control, and different analytical approaches can be performed to understand how this complex issue should be managed. With 14,915 surveys from year-long, state-wide data, we decided to perform three different analysis to evaluate vaccine hesitancy: principal component analysis, survival analysis and spatial-time series analysis. The aim was to bring up a more robust understanding of vaccine hesitancy and vaccine trust in a conservative state as is South Carolina. The results showed that the source of information influences the receipt of the vaccine, and so does the population’s trust in the science and approval behind the research. Interestingly, having multiple evaluations covers broadly a complex issue and allows to have a better representation of the data. Differences and similarities allow for rigorous results that can be used for public health professionals and policy makers, to improve the measurements and interventions. This study brought for the first time 3 different analysis to a state-wide year-long surveillance initiative from the state of South Carolina.