COVID-19 Vaccination Hesitancy among Youths in Soweto, South Africa
, Kennedy Otwombe 2,3, Dineo Thaele 4, Isaac Choge 4, Bent Steenberg 4, Clare Cutland 1, Shabir A. Madhi 1,4, Andile Sokani 4 and Nellie Myburgh 4
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Introduction: your statements like young people being less suceptible as optimistic biased may not hold true from the latest research. It is a fact that young people in 18-35 years of age-group have the least risk of severe Covid-19 disease especially in the absence of significant comorbidities
What do you mean by "even numbers" in sampling strategy
Primary Outcome should have been Covid-19 vaccination status - perceptions are secondary as people can be vaccinated despite having poor perception regarding the usefulness and effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines. It is not clear to me whether hesitant participants were fully vaccinated or not vaccinated
Several reference source not found errors are present in the results section, please check
Please specify the exact period of data collection
I will re-review the manuscript after your clarifications regarding vaccination status of the participants and association with Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy
There are some errors which may be corrected to improve the quality of presentation
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 1,
Thank you so much for the comments. We have implemented the recommendations. Please see the attachment.
Kind regards,
Jelioth Muthoni
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors aimed to investigate the attitudes and perceptions towards COVID-19 vaccination among young people in South Africa. Morbidity and mortality rates of COVID-19 globally and in South Africa is very high and the role of vaccines in reducing disease severity is important. Authors highlight the issue of vaccine hesitancy, which poses a major stumbling block to achieving sufficient vaccination coverage. The authors argue that understanding the attitudes and perceptions of young people towards COVID-19 vaccination is crucial, as this population has a higher potential to spread the virus due to their higher mobility and propensity to socialize. By scrutinizing these attitudes and perceptions, the authors aim to contribute to efforts to increase vaccine acceptance and uptake among young people in South Africa.
I have major comments which can make this paper good for further process.
In introduction mention more relevant studies to prove the hypothesis.
in method mention the inclusion exclusion criteria, how the participants were targeted, write consent information in the method section.
Better to make a study floe diagram to under stand the process clearly
perform chi square test for the table 1 among Non-hesitancy and Hesitancy to check significance
line 154 (Error! Reference source not found.) correct this. This must be correct in whole manuscript.
line 157 (Of the 87% (Error! Reference sourcesource not found.) correct the error.
table 2 is not appealing try to make a figure of it. wrote in the table footnote about which test was peroformed.
try to make 1 table of attitude qurestion, its a publication not thesis where we add seprate question in every table.
who it is possible p-value 0.000 (again check this)
remove heading from the discussion section
add study limitations and strngths in a seprate heading.
Check the complete file and remove all the errors.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 2,
Thank you so much for the comments. We have implemented the recommendations. Please see the attachment.
Kind regards,
Jelioth Muthoni
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The paper analyzed the cause of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy (VH) among 380 youth in Soweto and Thembelihle, South Africa. The authors summarized the causes as “The negative attitudes and perceptions towards COVID-19 immunization, which contributed to staggeringly high rates of VH and denialism. Clearly, as we saw, this was attributable to misinformation stemming from the Internet (and mostly unregulated social media platforms) as the primary source of non or counterfactual claims” and “the perception of COVID-19vaccines having serious side-effect, that is exaggerated in social is a contributing factor to VH.”
The paper is well written. However there are some formatting issues as “Error! Reference source not found” in the context. Please fix the errors throughout the results section.
Some minor suggestions:
1. Line 35 and 36: Please use “.” for the numbers instead of “,” for “6.8 million” and “9.5 million”.
2. Please keep the format of all table titles consistent, either italic or non-italic.
3. Please check the reference format consistency.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 3,
Thank you so much for the comments. We have implemented the recommendations. Please see the attachment.
Kind regards,
Jelioth Muthoni
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The authros addressed my comments
