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TopIntroduction
The COVID-19 pandemic changed people's lives, organizations, and society (Dwivedi et al., 2020; Fosso Wamba & Queiroz, 2021; Pan & Zhang, 2020; Venkatesh, 2020). It also challenged scholars (Cui et al., 2022) and practitioners (McKinsey, 2020) to develop robust and quick solutions to respond to this crisis. The production of vaccines in 2020 was a herculean effort requiring countries, governments, and organizations to develop and validate potential vaccine candidates in record time (Druedahl et al., 2021).
Vaccine hesitancy remains a barrier to the diffusion of COVID-19 vaccines and the allayment of the health crisis. In a recent 23-country survey, Lazarus et al. (2023) found that vaccine acceptance was still a serious public health issue, with hesitancy growing in eight countries. In a narrative review of 114 economies, Sallam et al. (2022) found that vaccine hesitancy was greatest in the Middle East and Northern Africa, Europe, and Central Asia, as well as in Western/Central Africa.
A number of papers have reported various barriers and enablers of the acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccine (Graffigna et al., 2020; Guidry et al., 2021; Harapan et al., 2020; Latkin et al., 2021; Qattan et al., 2021; Saied et al., 2021; Seale et al., 2021; Acar-Burkay & Cristian, 2022; Caserotti et al., 2021).
Despite the strong growth in the literature about COVID-19 vaccine acceptance, few empirical papers have addressed the enablers and the barriers of COVID-19 vaccine acceptance in an integrated model, and little is known about the influence of digital technologies on COVID-19 vaccine acceptance. To address these research gaps, our study seeks to answer the following research questions (RQ).
This paper makes several contributions. First, we develop a comprehensive model to investigate the behavioral intention of vaccine adoption by conceptualizing the COVID-19 vaccines as technological innovations. Second, we explore COVID-19 vaccine acceptance through a rich mix of social and contextual factors, and health and vaccine beliefs, in an integrated model. In so doing, we expand the body of COVID-19 vaccine acceptance literature, which has mainly focused on vaccine hesitancy (Lazarus et al., 2023; Sallam et al., 2022). Finally, understanding the set of influential factors aids in tailoring targeted, effective health communications and policies, improving vaccine uptake and, ultimately, public health outcomes. These insights could help policymakers and health educators in building trust, especially in regions where it is a significant determinant of vaccine acceptance, such as South Africa.
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the literature on COVID-19 vaccines as a technological innovation, and then presents the hypotheses and the research model of this study. Section 3 provides details of the research method, followed by data analysis and a presentation of results in section 4. Subsequently, section 5 is devoted to discussion, implications, limitations, and future research directions. Finally, in section 6, we highlight the main conclusions.
TopLiterature Review And Hypothesis Development
This section presents COVID-19 vaccines as technological innovations and their acceptance as part of the innovation diffusion process.