Coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine barriers and incentives to uptake: literature review

Methods

This literature review is based on a search and analysis of scholarly research on vaccine uptake in the UK. The search was carried out between November 2021 and February 2022.

A standard literature review has been undertaken on a number of search engines, such as KandE (a Scottish Government resource covering several databases), Google Scholar, PubMed and ScienceDirect. The search included terms like "vaccine uptake", "Covid", "coronavirus", "ethnic minorities", "pregnant women", "disadvantaged groups" and "long-term conditions". Further references have been added through the snowballing technique, where relevant studies are mentioned in a source and reviewed for additional evidence.

The majority of the sources examined in this literature review were published between 2021 and 2022. Priority has been given to studies focusing on motivators and barriers to uptake following the implementation of the vaccination programme, although some work examining the intention to get vaccinated before the deployment of Covid-19 vaccines is also included.

The body of evidence consists of 106 papers, the majority of which are peer-reviewed. Yet, a small number of pre-prints have been included, given the sometimes lengthy process of publication in a scholarly journal and the need to consider findings from the most up-to-date work.

A limitation of the evidence base is the use of broad categories such as 'BAME' that do not allow for detailed analysis of sub-groups. Other categories for ethnicity also differ across the literature, hence affecting comparability (e.g. 'White' can be compared to umbrella terms such as 'other groups', or minority ethnic groups can be grouped together in different ways, for example using 'Black' for both Black African and Black Caribbean groups). Furthermore, a number of sources simply refer to the 'adult population' (18+) making stratified analysis based on age impossible.

Another limitation of many studies is that they measure intention to get the Covid-19 vaccine, which does not always translate into uptake. Intention is likely to change over time, as new research (on side effects, for example) gets published or rates of transmission and restrictions change.