Prediction of factors influencing adults‘ likelihood of accepting any COVID-19 vaccination and their willingness to pay – a nation-wide discrete choice experiment from India. (Preprint)

Vaccines remain a key prevention strategy against any contagion and mitigate an epidemic/pandemic. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic vaccine uptake was not as brisk as expected right from the roll out because of concerns regarding certain vaccine attributes like effectiveness, risk of adverse events, and cost among other factors that affected decision making. Thus, a discrete choice experiment (DCE) was conducted to identify the key attributes of COVID-19 vaccine for its acceptability and people’s willingness to pay for it. To identify the key attributes of COVID-19 vaccine for acceptability and the participants’ willingness to pay (WTP) for it in the face of an ongoing pandemic by the general population of India. The secondary objectives were to estimate the extent of and predictors of vaccine hesitancy among the Indian public. A pan-India digital cross-sectional survey was conducted among those over 18 years, any gender, and residing in India for at least six months. The DCE section had six hypothetical vaccine pairs that included a trap question with one of the vaccine pair being unambiguously better than the other. Those who failed the trap question were excluded. : Of 10,000 respondents, 1241 failed the trap question and 8759 responses were finally analysed. The most important attributes were effectiveness and duration of protection. The respondents were willing to spend approximately INR1549 (20·12USD) and INR587 (7·62USD) per dose to take vaccines that provided 90% protection (relative to 50% protection) and a protective duration of 5 years (relative to 6 months) respectively. When in a pandemic, and while seeking to achieve close to 100% vaccination, understanding these issues pertaining to vaccine acceptability such as effectiveness or duration of protection becomes imperative. CTRI Number: CTRI/2021/09/036631