Vaccine Hesitancy: Exploring the Role of Temporal and Cross-country Variation in COVID Rules, Vaccine Media Coverage, and Public Health Policy Consistency

Project Summary The project "Vaccine Hesitancy: Exploring the Role of Temporal and Cross-country Variation in COVID Rules, Media Coverage, and Public Health Policies" will investigate the factors that determine whether and how quickly individuals were willing to get the COVID-19 vaccination. We leverage variation, over time, within and across sixteen countries, in COVID vaccination policies, media coverage of the vaccines, and policy stances of public health authorities. We will harmonize the COVID vaccination policies across all countries. In all sixteen countries, we link national vaccination rate time series data to COVID vaccine policies and a harmonized set of data on general COVID-mitigation policies that vary temporally. In fifteen of the sixteen countries, we do so for vaccination rate time series data for sub national geographic units. In fifteen of the sixteen countries, we will link the COVID vaccine and general COVID-mitigation policies to individual level data. With these data, we will exploit the substantial temporal and geographic policy variation, in and across countries, and individual demographic characteristics to explain who did or did not get the vaccine and why.