Vaccine-skeptic physicians and COVID-19 vaccination rates
Andreas Steinmayr and
Manuel Rossi
Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck
Abstract:
What is the role of general practitioners (GPs) in supporting or hindering public health efforts? We investigate the influence of vaccine-skeptic GPs on their patients’ decisions to get a COVID-19 vaccination. We identify vaccine-skeptic GPs from the signatories of an open letter in which 199 Austrian physicians expressed their skepticism about COVID-19 vaccines. We examine small rural municipalities where patients choose a GP primarily based on geographic proximity. These vaccine-skeptic GPs reduced the vaccination rate by 5.6 percentage points. This estimate implies that they discouraged 7.9% of the vaccinable population. The effect appears to stem from discouragement rather than from rationing access to the vaccine.
Keywords: COVID-19 vaccination; vaccine hesitancy; health policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.uibk.ac.at/downloads/c9821000/wpaper/2022-16.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: Vaccine-Skeptic Physicians and COVID-19 Vaccination Rates (2022) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inn:wpaper:2022-16
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Judith Courian ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).