Vax-Action: tackling effectively vaccine hesitancy in Europe
Vax-Action: tackling effectively vaccine hesitancy in Europe
Contact person: Gualtiero Ricciardi
Short title: VAX-Action
Announcement: CALL CONTRIBUTION - 1900
Project Code: 101133273-EU4H-2022-PJ-5
Start date: 01/12/2023
End Date: -
Coordinator: -
Funding body: EUROPEAN UNION
Link: https://vax-action.eu/
Abstract: Vaccine hesitancy is defined as the delay in accepting or refusing vaccines despite their availability. While not a new phenomenon, it is increasingly recognized globally as both an academic and political challenge. Its main consequence is lower than expected vaccination rates.
The main strategies to counter vaccine hesitancy focus on two levels: the general population (information campaigns, fact-checking, targeted communication) and frontline healthcare workers (FHWs), through specific training and operational guidelines. However, it is not yet clear which interventions are effective, for which groups, in which contexts and with what timing.
The VAX-ACTION project aims to support EU Member States and key stakeholders in planning and implementing combined, targeted and evidence-based interventions aimed at reducing vaccine hesitancy. The project addresses the need to identify the types of interventions currently available, evaluate their effectiveness, transfer effective interventions to new contexts and analyze the unsuccessful ones, creating opportunities for learning and optimization.
The main value of VAX-ACTION lies in the design and implementation of interventions and recommendations based on solid theoretical foundations, consolidated scientific evidence and best practices in the evaluation of health policies. The project adopts a co-design approach, involving frontline health workers and specific target populations (e.g. newly arrived migrants, hesitant parents, people with low socio-economic status), to adapt interventions both to recently approved vaccines, such as those against Covid-19 and monkeypox (mpox), and to vaccines established in national immunization programs.
The interventions will be implemented in the target regions of Portugal, Italy, France, Romania and the Czech Republic and evaluated according to a controlled experimental design, with two contexts per region (intervention group and control group, 1:1). The final recommendations for improvement and implementation of the changes will be accompanied by tailored dissemination and evaluation strategies, fostering the scalability and adaptation of interventions to other Member States, WHO European Region countries and other nations.
