A study of 1.3 million US and UK adults yesterday in Nature Communications finds significantly lower self-reported COVID-19 vaccine uptake among even willing non-White Americans during the initial vaccine rollout—but no such disparity among UK participants.A team led by Massachusetts General Hospital researchers conducted a cohort study among 87,388 US and 1,254,294 UK volunteers in the smartphone-based COVID Symptom Study from March 2020 to February 2021.
They used logistic regression to estimate the odds of vaccine hesitancy and uptake.US minorities up to 3 times more vaccine-hesitantAmong 1,228,638 respondents to a question about willingness to vaccinate, 91% of US and 95% of UK participants said they would be vaccinated if it were offered.Racial minorities in both countries were up to three times more likely than White participants to say they were unsure or unwilling to be vaccinated against COVID-19. "And though some degree of vaccine skepticism is noted among racial and ethnic minority groups in the U.S.
and U.K., we observe particularly low vaccine uptake among Black individuals in the U.S., even among those willing to undergo vaccination," the researchers wrote.Black participants in the United States were less likely to be vaccinated than their White peers (odd ration [OR], 0.71), even after adjusting for age, region, underlying illnesses, and occupation as a healthcare worker.In the United States, relative to White volunteers, the age-adjusted ORs for vaccine hesitancy were 3.84 for Black, 1.69 for Hispanic, and 1.22 for Asian participants, and 2.14 for those with other or more than one race.Vaccine-hesitant US participants tended to be younger, female, less likely to have had heart disease or cancer, and more