Attitudes towards vaccination and knowledge about antibiotics: Analysis of Wellcome Monitor survey data

Vaccine hesitancy and antimicrobial resistance are biomedically connected public health challenges, but to date minimal research has examined social connections between the UK public’s attitudes towards vaccination and attitudes towards antibiotic use. Understanding the extent to which these issues are attitudinally parallel would be valuable for implementing and evaluating public health interventions.

Using data from the Wellcome Trust Monitor Wave 4 this study examined social associations between these two areas. An ordinal logistic regression model predicting knowledge level about antibiotics was fitted using 2,654 observations, controlling for known outcome covariates, with perceptions of the risk of side-effects from vaccination and of the efficacy of vaccination as a preventative intervention as independent variables.