Acceptance and adverse effects following COVID-19 vaccination among the health care workers at a health care centre in the most backward district of India

BACKGROUND: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020. Researchers have evaluated many repurposed drugs for treating COVID-19 in terms of both efficacy and safety in the past several months. It has been seen that vaccination is an effective way to stop the pandemic from spreading further. Being frontline workers dealing with COVID-19 patients, the healthcare workers (HCWs) in public and private sectors were prioritized to get vaccinated first. Also, HCWs are a reliable source of information on vaccination to patients; therefore, their acceptance or otherwise of COVID-19 vaccines may influence the uptake of COVID-19 vaccine among the general population. METHODOLOGY: A cross-sectional study was conducted to assess the acceptance and adverse effects following the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine among HCWs of Shaheed Hasan Khan Mewati Government Medical College (SHKM GMC), a tertiary healthcare centre located in the district of Nuh Haryana. RESULT: In our study, more than half of the respondents (63.8%) experienced mild–moderate anxiety while the rest of the respondents experienced mild anxiety or moderately high levels of anxiety prior to the first dose, which is indicative of hesitancy towards the vaccine. Two-thirds of respondents in our study reported mild and common symptoms following vaccination while the remaining one-third did not report any symptom. More than half of the respondents (67.3%) claimed not taking the first dose even after two months after the initiation of vaccination drive at SHKM GMC, stating fear of some kind of reaction or side-effects, safety concerns regarding vaccine, reservations concerning the success of vaccination, and the efficiency of the vaccine. CONCLUSION: Our findings highlighted reasons for hesitancy among HCWs regarding COVID-19 vaccination along with the adverse effects encountered after the first dose. COVID-19 vaccine concerns among the HCW population should be addressed so that HCWs can be empowered to lead communication campaigns to improve COVID-19 vaccine uptake among the general population. Thus, it is important to hold such surveys.