Vaccine scepticism and attitudes towards the coronavirus in Romania and among Hungarians in Transylvania – November-December 2021
Our study focused on vaccine scepticism and public attitudes towards COVID-19 in general in Romania and among the Hungarians in Transylvania. Our main question was what might be behind the very low vaccination uptake and high vaccine scepticism in comparison to other European countries.
The questionnaire used in the telephone survey consisted of two main components. On the one hand, we asked about the respondents’ willingness to vaccinate and their opinions and attitudes directly related to COVID-19, on the other hand, about factors which, based on the relevant literature, were assumed to have an impact on the propensity to vaccinate. The research report presents our findings in three parts:
- First, the answers to the questions on willingness to vaccinate and COVID-19 are presented.
- Second, we describe the basic distributions of background variables influencing vaccination uptake.
- Thirdly, the impact of these background variables is discussed on vaccine non-adoption (unvaccination) and vaccine refusal (vaccine scepticism)
On the one hand, we compare results of the whole of Romania, the Transylvanian Hungarians and the Szeklerland Hungarians. The Szeklerland was represented by an increased number of cases, and its separate presentation was justified by the fact that the willingness to vaccinate in this region was known to be lower than the national average, as well as the average for Hungarians in Transylvania. Second, we show how the proportion of unvaccinated and vaccine-sceptical individuals varies according to different explanatory variables. Vaccine sceptics represent a subset of the unvaccinated population (the hard-core, so to speak) who had not only refused so far to get vaccinated, but who, by their own admission, are not willing to get vaccinated in the future, either.
The full text of the report can be downloaded at: https://balvanyos.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Oltasszkepticizmus-es-a-koronavirussal-kapcsolatos-attitudok_2021-1.pdf