Vaccine Hesitancy: A Netnographic Study of 160 Moroccan’s Internet Users

Abstract

Morrocco, like all countries of the world, has faced recently two great infectious diseases that have impacted human lives; coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) and measles. Several actions have been carried out as part of the national plans to rapidly counter these diseases and convince people to get vaccinated as possible, not only to protect themselves but also others.

However, many people haven’t been looking for vaccines. Their commitments toward these preventive actions were different, ranging from acceptation to rejection or hesitation, depending to the nature of vaccine that they will get as well as to their social context, which made a looming hurdle to ending both COVID-19 pandemic and measles epidemic, and bring us to make a netnographic study about vaccine hesitancy in these people.

This research focused on to how far Moroccan internet users are really vaccine hesitant and why some of them didn’t believe in vaccination. At the end, we tried to give some recommendations to healthcare professionals to how communicate with doubtful people and make them trust in vaccines.