Knowledge and Attitudes of Medical Students toward COVID-19 Vaccine in Saudi Arabia

Medical students are the future caregivers of communities, and therefore it is important to rectify their misconceptions about the COVID-19 vaccine. We aimed to explore the knowledge and attitudes among medical students toward the COVID-19 vaccine in Saudi Arabia and to compare the level of knowledg...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Vaccines (Basel) 2022-03, Vol.10 (4), p.541
Main Authors: Habib, Syed Shahid, Alamri, Musab Saleh, Alkhedr, Mudafr Mahmoud, Alkhorijah, Mohammad Abdullah, Jabaan, Rayan Dhafer, Alanzi, Mubarak Khalid
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attitudes
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
COVID-19 vaccine
COVID-19 vaccines
Epidemiology
FDA approval
Immunization
knowledge
medical students
Random sampling
Saudi Arabia
Statistical sampling
Students
Vaccines
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Summary:Medical students are the future caregivers of communities, and therefore it is important to rectify their misconceptions about the COVID-19 vaccine. We aimed to explore the knowledge and attitudes among medical students toward the COVID-19 vaccine in Saudi Arabia and to compare the level of knowledge between preclinical and clinical years. This epidemiological cross-sectional study of 1445 (47.3% were pre-clinical and 52.7% were clinical year) medical students was conducted at various universities in Saudi Arabia using a simple random sampling technique. The results revealed that 34.3% students did not know how the Pfizer vaccine worked, with a high proportion in preclinical students (69.4%). Almost 37% of participants thought that one could become infected with COVID-19 via the COVID-19 vaccine, and 67.1% of these students were pre-clinical. About 22.6% of students did not trust COVID-19 vaccine information from the health ministry, and the majority of them (79.8%) were pre-clinical. Vaccine hesitancy was shown by about 33.3% ( = 481) of subjects, and surprisingly, almost half of them (48.6%) thought that the COVID-19 vaccine involved conspiracy; the majority of them were pre-clinical (97.9%). The overall response of students indicates a significantly lower level of knowledge and increased negative attitudes of preclinical students toward the COVID-19 vaccine. However, the vast majority of students agreed on the importance of the COVID-19 vaccine to decrease the spread of the disease.
ISSN:2076-393X
2076-393X
DOI:10.3390/vaccines10040541