ABSTRACT
Background: COVID 19 is a viral pandemic first discovered in 2019 that has been responsible for major World health and economic crisis in recent years. Vaccination has been deployed as a major strategy in limiting COVID 19 by the World Health Assembly. However, in Nigeria only a small portion of the population has been vaccinated till date, partly due to wrong perception and attitudes of the public toward these vaccines.
Objective: The objective of this study was to determine the perception and attitudes of public school teachers in Benin City, Edo State toward COVID 19 vaccination.
Method: A cross sectional study was carried out on 147 public school teachers in 6 public schools in Benin City, Edo State. Ethical approval was obtained from the Edo State Education board, the school and informed consent was duly obtained from all participants involved in the survey. A self-administered standardized questionnaire was distributed among these teachers using convenience sampling. This data was entered, cleaned and analysed with the aid of Excel spreadsheet and IBM SPSS v26. Descriptive analysis was used to determine the perception and attitudes of these participants to COVID 19 vaccination.
Discussion: The overall attitude towards Covid 19 vaccination was positive at 60.5%. 49.7% of the respondents had already been administered the Covid 19 vaccine and 67.3% of those without the vaccine stated that they would be willing to take the vaccine when it becomes available to them. 66.7% indicated they would be willing to recommend the vaccines to their students. This indicates a generally positive response to the Covid 19 vaccination among these public school teachers. Among those with hesitancy toward the vaccine, the reasons mainly included safety concerns (47.6%), effectiveness (34%) and affordability (18.4%). This general high positivity toward the vaccine may be due to the relatively high level of education among these teachers (72.8% had at least tertiary level education).
Conclusion: There was an overall positive perception and attitude of the public school teachers in this study to COVID 19 vaccination (60.5%). It is recommended that more effort is directed towards education on COVID 19 vaccination to further improve the attitudes towards these vaccines.
Key words: Covid-19 vaccine, public school teachers, attitude, perception and acceptance.
