People who think that the risk of COVID-19 is small are the most reluctant to get vaccinated, according to a study approved for publication in the Croatian Medical Journal, the Jutarnji List daily reported on Monday.

The study, written by sociologists Dragan Bagic from the Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and Adrijana Suljok and Branko Ancic from the Institute for Social Research, is part of a project by the Croatian Science Foundation called “Resilience of Croatian society against the COVID-19 pandemic”.

The purpose of the study, conducted on a sample of 765 respondents, was to establish who refuses to get vaccinated and why. It showed that more than a third of the respondents hesitate or refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

The most frequent reason given is the view that the vaccine is not safe or effective enough. Some of the respondents said they would prefer to gain natural immunity by recovering from the disease over vaccination, while some of the hesitant respondents also expressed mistrust of vaccines in general.

The study showed that young respondents, women, people with lower education, and those living in small towns are more inclined to hesitate or refuse to get vaccinated. Foreign studies have also shown similar findings.

“These are the groups that the vaccination campaign should focus on,” Suljok was quoted as saying. “We should keep in mind that some of these people cannot be influenced and are less likely to change their opinion. Our study has also shown that respondents who expressed a lack of trust in science are more inclined to hesitate or refuse to get vaccinated,” she added.

Suljok said that the term “anti-vaxxers”, used to denote the people who hesitate or refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19, is not appropriate because anti-vaxxers are mistrustful of vaccines in general.

“By labelling all people, including those who are primarily afraid of the COVID-19 vaccine because it is new and has been developed quickly, as anti-vaxxers, we are actually pushing them towards the group of real anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, which might have negative consequences through increased opposition to ‘regular’ vaccines,” Suljok said.

She said that the public health campaign has failed to get the message across to a section of the population about the danger of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and that this was partly due to conflicting messages from the government advisory council and the predominant public narrative that mostly elderly people and serious patients get seriously ill.