Research topic about COVID-19 vaccine

Dear Colleagues,

As you are all well aware, developing a vaccine for COVID-19 is our best hope for successfully confronting the current global epidemic.

However, coming up with an effective vaccine (or several of them) is not enough: People need to actually take the vaccine. As with many health behaviors, the recommendation and availability of a product is the first step, but implementation ultimately depends on the cooperation of the individuals addressed. Hence, while biomedical scientific knowledge is useful for devising vaccines, basic and applied scientific knowledge of human behavior is required for the successful implementation of vaccination.

Reluctance, hesitancy, and rejection of vaccines have been an ongoing issue worldwide since the late 1990s. Scholarly attention has been directed to understanding the factors driving these behaviors, spanning from demographics to attitudes, individual differences, and persuasion approaches.

To achieve a more extensive understanding of recent scientific knowledge as it applies to possible COVID-19-related vaccines, this Special Issue will focus on the critical issues, challenges, successes, and new ways of thinking about uptake of a COVID-19 vaccine.

We invite you to contribute with an original report, observation or review, highlighting (i) prevalence of acceptance, hesitancy or refusal to accept a COVID-19 vaccine; (ii) associated attributes or factors driving hesitancy/refusal ranging from the personal and relational to the community and cultural; (iii) experimental work testing intention/behavior change in relation to the uptake vaccination; and (iv) the influence of media on the decision-making process—from literacy to social media.

Qualitative and quantitative methods are invited. Manuscripts will follow standard kournal peer-review practices, and those accepted for publication will appear in the Special Issue on “Psychological Aspects of COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake”.

Prof. Dr. Efrat NeterProf. Dr. Karen Morgan 

Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Vaccines is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• vaccination hesitancy
• vaccination refusal
• vaccination barriers
• intervention
• decision aids
• risk perception

Published Papers (26 papers)

PM Scott Morrison after a National Security Committee meeting on March 1. Morrison later tested positive for COVID. Mick Tsikas/AAP Image March 3, 2022

Scott Morrison has COVID. It’s a big deal but not how youthink

Hassan Vally, Deakin University

Imagine if the PM had caught COVID two years ago? We knew so little about COVID with certainty back then, and what we did know was truly frightening. Here’s what’s changed since then.

Five new COVID-19 research projects are announced today, receiving a total of over £4 million from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

They will study the durability of vaccine responses, low responses linked with health conditions, and the effect of booster shots.

The studies will research the strength and durability of the immune response in a wide range of people, including:

• people with conditions that result in a weakened immune system, specifically HIV, B cell lymphoma, inflammatory bowel disease and chronic myeloid leukaemia
• people who are obese
• health care workers
• people with a weak vaccine response from the general population.

These studies aim to:

• determine how long immunity from the vaccine lasts
• identify groups of people at risk from low vaccine responses
• determine if and when vaccine boosters are required for these groups, as well as the wider population.

This will help to inform clinical management and vaccine policy.

Immune response

One of the studies will potentially involve administering booster shots to participants with a low vaccine response and monitoring the effect it has on their immune systems.

Another study, conducted across the UK, South Africa and Brazil, will monitor immunity and vaccine effectiveness to virus variants.

Researchers from the SCORPIO study will monitor the effect of different levels of weight loss on the immune response of 200 people with severe obesity taking part in an existing weight loss study.

World-leading health and data research

Science Minister Amanda Solloway said:

As we build back better from the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s critical that we continue supporting our world class researchers to better understand the virus and how to tackle it, including our successful vaccination programme.

These five COVID-19 research studies we are throwing our weight behind today will be crucial in helping us to solve important unanswered questions – from how long vaccine immunity lasts to the potential effectiveness of booster shots.

Dr Rob Buckle, Chief Scientist of the Medical Research Council (MRC), part of UKRI which funded the trials, said:

Vaccines have proved to be an invaluable tool in the fight against COVID-19, but there are still questions to be answered, from the durability of post-vaccine immunity to vaccine efficacy for people with weakened immune systems.

These studies will help provide guidance to policy makers and clinicians on a range of issues, including when and for whom booster shots are necessary.

The studies are part of the National Core Studies programme for COVID-19 projects, which is:

• enabling the UK to use research and health data to inform both our near and long-term responses to COVID-19
• accelerating progress to establish a world-leading health data and research infrastructure for the future.

The projects receiving funding are listed below.

Investigation of proven vaccine breakthrough by SARS-CoV-2 variants in established UK healthcare worker cohorts: SIREN consortium and PITCH Plus Pathway – £1.57 million

Dr Susan Hopkins, Public Health England

The SIREN Consortium aims to investigate immunity against COVID-19 post-vaccination, including the durability of the immune response, using the largest global cohort study following around 45,000 healthcare workers. They complete regular antibody tests and fortnightly PCR tests.

This additional funding will enable the consortium to undertake detailed clinical and laboratory investigation of individuals with post-vaccination ‘breakthrough’ infection to:

• identify genetic, immunological and viral factors linked to these infections
• provide evidence on the effectiveness of the vaccination programme and to inform future policy.

An immunogenetic approach to guide the need for booster shots and combat immune failure in SARS-CoV-2 vaccine response – £980,000

Professor Julian Knight, University of Oxford

This project seeks to improve our ability to identify individuals at risk of developing a low COVID-19 vaccine response by understanding the underlying mechanisms involved.

To do this, researchers will work with the National COVID-19 Infection Survey to contact individuals in the general UK population who vary in antibody responsiveness to vaccination. They will then use this data to map genetic markers that can help identify at-risk individuals and populations.

Complementing this genetic analysis, in a separate study, researchers will also investigate the effect of booster shots on those with low vaccine response.

The durability of immune responses to vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 and its variants – £780,000

Professor Rosemary Boyton, Imperial College London

This collaborative study will investigate immunity to SARS-CoV-2 infection in the UK, South Africa and Brazil, including variants:

The project aims to understand the durability and nature of immune protection from COVID-19 in the vaccinated and following natural infection, and susceptibility to reinfection and breakthrough infections, especially with variants.

It will also investigate if and how the vaccine response is impaired in immunosuppressed people who have inflammatory bowel disease or chronic myeloid leukaemia.

This will allow researchers to provide guidance regarding the need for vaccine boosters in healthy adults and immunosuppressed people.

SARS COV2 vaccine response in obesity – SCORPIO study – £750,000

Dr James Thaventhiran and Professor Sadaf Farooqi, University of Cambridge

The project will investigate the effect of obesity on COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness. As part of an existing weight loss study involving 200 people with severe obesity, they will monitor the effect of different levels of weight loss on the immune response to vaccination.

The weight loss study participants’ immune responses will then be compared against the those of 1,500 people in the healthy weight range.

Researchers will also perform a meta-analysis of 50,000 people from existing UK studies to investigate the link between BMI and vaccine responses across the full range from overweight, to obese and severely obese.

By doing this, the researchers aim to identify nutritional and metabolomic biomarkers that are linked with vaccine responses and test whether weight loss can improve vaccine responses in obese people.

Determining the immunological basis for weakened SARS-CoV-2 vaccination outcomes – £420,000

Dr Laura McCoy, UCL

This study will establish the strength and durability of COVID-19 vaccine responses in people with two conditions that weaken the immune system: HIV and B cell lymphoma, a cancer of immune cells.

The study will compare how these conditions, which affect different parts of the immune system (HIV impairs ‘T cells’ and B cell cancers reduce ‘B cells’), affect vaccine response and will also compare a range of severity, from mildly to severely affected.

This data will help to better understand how these people respond to vaccines, and how this differs depending on how severely compromised their immune system is, to inform clinical decision making and input into policy for vaccine boosters.

Top image:  Credit: Chaz Bharj / Getty Images

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