Subjective Reasons for COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy and Sociodemographic Predictors of Vaccination in Nigeria: An Online Survey

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Overall, this is a very well written and an interesting and informative article. I thank to the authors for their hard work and contributions to conduct this study and writing the manuscript. Please review the recommendations as mentioned above and reconsider to include them as per your ability.  

Introduction:

Well written, nothing to mention.

Methods;

1.Please specify whether the participants under 16 years were not able to participate in the survey or were excluded later; How did the selection was done as it mentioned “no participation restriction was applied”? This is not very clear, and would be good to add.

2.Where the data was collected? In any online database? How and where the survey tool “Google form” gathered the data? Please elaborate the data collection process.

3. How the model was validated? Was there any scope for cross validation? Please provide that information as that adds on the reliability of the study. You may refer to the following study for more information-

“Sociodemographic predictors of COVID-19 vaccine acceptance: a nationwide US-based survey study. Pritish Mondal, ... Lilly Su”

Link- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033350621002985?via%3Dihub

4. Table 2 could be more specific. Not sure whether the population with multiple variables/factors were considered or not? Was it a “Check all that apply” question? Was there any possibility of identifying the overlapping factors? Please elaborate.

Results;

1.       Is it possible to add the p-values in the table 3, in addition to the CIs? Would be good to also compare the P-values along with CI.

2.       The source of knowledge is always important to know, while talking about “misconception” or “misinformation”, which is missing in this study. Was there any scope to add this information to the study? Authors may see/refer the following study in this regard-

“Sociodemographic predictors of COVID-19 vaccine acceptance: a nationwide US-based survey study. Pritish Mondal, ... Su”

Link- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033350621002985?via%3Dihub

3. Often the cost of vaccine or other issues related to the vaccine accessibility is one of the important contributors behind vaccine hesitancy. Inclusion of that information is needed to understand whether the vaccine hesitancy was also contributed by the accessibility issues in addition to the factors mentioned?

4. Was there any association/co-relation between vaccine costs/accessibility and poor socioeconomic status? Might be an interesting finding to consider.

Discussion;

1.As mentioned in the limitations, ‘Generalizability’ is an issue for the internet-online surveys. In addition to the internet, language barrier, and technology /computer aversion and accessibility issues among certain population (elderly age group or female) could also be important factors contributing to the bias in this study, and might be good to mention.

2. As this is capturing just a small portion of the population, the study report needs to be considered as a trend, needs to be externally validated with a large sample survey prior to accepting the results as a general trend. Please see the ‘limitations’ as mentioned in the very similar study based on India and USA.

“Perceived Stress, Knowledge, and Preventive Behaviors in Indian versus US-based Participants During COVID-19: A Survey Study”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8473728/

3.       Lastly, please mention one or two features, unique to this study or what makes this study different/ stand-alone, over other similar articles published on vaccine hesitancy among the Nigerians.

Author Response

Please find attached

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Title: Subjective Reasons for Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy and socio-2 demographic predictors of vaccination in Nigeria: An online 3 survey

Journal: COVID

The topic is of interest, and the manuscript is well illustrated.

Major Comments:

1. Are there controversies in this field? What are the most recent and important achievements in the field? In my opinion, answers to these questions should be emphasized. Perhaps, in some cases, novelty of the recent achievements should be highlighted by indicating the year of publication in the text of the manuscript.

2. The results and discussion section is very weak and no emphasis is given on the discussion of the results like why certain effects are coming in to existence and what could be the possible reason behind them?

3. More analysis are needed.

4. Results and conclusion: The section devoted to the explanation of the results suffers from the same problems revealed so far. Your storyline in the results section (and conclusion) is hard to follow. Moreover, the conclusions reached are really far from what one can infer from the empirical results.

5. The discussion should be rather organized around arguments avoiding simply describing details without providing much meaning. A real discussion should also link the findings of the study to theory and/or literature.

6. Spacing, punctuation marks, grammar, and spelling errors should be reviewed thoroughly. I found so many typos throughout the manuscript.

7. English is modest. Therefore, the authors need to improve their writing style. In addition, the whole manuscript needs to be checked by native English speakers.

Author Response

Please find attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Title: Subjective Reasons for Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy and socio-2 demographic predictors of vaccination in Nigeria: An online 3 survey

Journal: COVID

The topic is of interest, and the manuscript is well illustrated.

Minor Comments:

1. More analysis are needed.

2. English is still modest.

Author Response

Comment 1: English is still modest

Response 1: Thank you for the comment. We have the whole manuscript proofread by a third-party native language editor. All new changes are highlighted with the 'tract change' function.

Comment 2: More analyses are needed

Response 2: We have conducted another logistic regression to explore whether any subjective reasons (Table 2) had a significant association with vaccination uptake, of which the various reasons were used as predictors of COVID-19 vaccination. However, we included the analysis as a supplemental table as it does not provide any additional information in reaching conclusions, but we interpreted the result under the 'result section' on page 7 lines 193-197 of the manuscript.