Rajesh Kumar Yadav, Elina Khatri, Sujan Babu Marahatta, Dipendra Kumar Yadav, Yadu nath Baral, Jiwan Kumar Poudyal, Srijana Poudel, Prabin Sharma, Anupama Sharma, Sujata Pokhrel, Sushila Baral*
Introduction: A new corona virus strain SARS-COV-2 had emerged as a global challenge to human health. Vaccines are most effective strategy and important public health measures but still people were hesitated to accept the vaccine. For the vaccine’s acceptance by the people, many influencing factors were playing role. Study was designed to assess the perception of young adult on acceptance of vaccines.
Methodology: A web-based cross-sectional study was used and quantitative methods were conducted among the 390 young adults from all seven provinces of Nepal. The online survey was conducted to enroll all the young adults using Simple Random Sampling (SRS) techniques. Participants were asked to fill out a survey form that was made available through email and social media outlets such as Facebook and Viber. The data were downloaded in Excel and imported to SPSS version 16 for analysis.
Results: More than half (53.1%) of participants had favourable attitude whereas, around three-fourth (72.8%) of participants had satisfactory perception towards COVID vaccine. The study showed significant associations between i) Faculty of study and perception ii) enrolled in health insurance and perception iii) Fear from COVID 19 and perception iv) Education status and attitude v) vaccine increase allergic reaction and attitude.
Conclusion: The findings reflect favourable attitude among half of the respondents but more young adults had favourable perception towards vaccine in Nepal. Vaccine safety and its efficacy should be disseminated through the public domain which is trustable to change the attitude of the young adult through understanding domain of health belief model, information about the vaccines and its consequences should be clearly stated. Efforts must be made to restrain the spread of misinformation about the vaccine. Interventional educational campaign through internet regarding vaccine should be focused targeting non-health sciences background people to avoid low inoculation rates.