the sizeable physical health benefits of COVID vaccines, in particular, the significantly reduced risk of severe illness, hospitalization, and death from the virus, are well known.
But what about the mental health benefits of vaccination? Does vaccination help decrease the psychological distress associated with COVID? And if so, how substantial are the positive effects?
We speculate that COVID vaccination would be beneficial to people’s mental well-being, as it could reduce anxiety surrounding COVID (at least, regarding a person’s own health).
in a new studyUsing data from thousands of UK adults, we have shown that vaccination is linked to a significant decrease in psychological distress associated with COVID.
To understand the mental health benefits of vaccination, we compared the mental well-being of people who had received the vaccine (one or two doses) with those who had not. We use data from the Longitudinal study of UK households, a large annual household survey that captures a wide range of information on adults living in the UK. We specifically looked at data collected between January and March 2021.
The measure of mental well-being used in this study was the General Health Questionnaire. It consists of a 12-item scale designed to assess stress, anxiety, and happiness.
One problem with simply comparing the mental well-being of the two groups (those who had been vaccinated and those who hadn’t) is that there may be important differences between them. This may mean that we could confuse differences between groups in mental well-being as due to vaccination when they could be the result of other factors.
Our approach to this potential problem was to match both groups carefully, so that people who were vaccinated were very similar to those who were not, for example, in characteristics such as age.
We also had a variable in the survey that captured whether people were willing to be vaccinated, which meant that we could match both groups based on their willingness to be vaccinated. This could be important as people who refuse a vaccine, for example, due to a less trust in governmentyou may have lower well-being in the first place.
Our results suggest that for the group of people who were vaccinated, the vaccination led to a large reduction in their psychological distress.
To understand how large this estimated effect was, we compared it to the estimated effect of other major life events on mental well-being (taken from other studies). The well-being benefit in the vaccinated group was equivalent to about one-half to two-thirds of the mental well-being benefit associated with switching unemployment to full employment.
Differences between age groups
We should note that while just under half of the respondents in our sample were vaccinated, due to the gradual roll-out of COVID vaccines, this was also the half most likely to be at risk of infection. by COVID.
That said, we did have a significant number of people across all age groups who were vaccinated.
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We looked at whether there was any difference in the benefits of vaccination for mental well-being between the different groups. Specifically, we compared the estimated mental well-being benefits of vaccination for people younger than the average (median) age (56) in our sample with people older than this age. We also compared people classified as “clinically vulnerable” (people at higher risk of harm from infection) with those who were not.
We found that the mental well-being benefits associated with vaccination were largely concentrated in older and clinically vulnerable groups. Our proposed explanation is that, in the absence of vaccination, anxiety about contracting COVID would be particularly strong for this group.
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On the other hand, when we looked at the younger groups who were not clinically vulnerable, we found little evidence to suggest that vaccination led to a substantial improvement in their mental well-being.
It is perhaps worth noting here that, despite a successful COVID vaccination campaign in the UK in general, younger groups they are more likely to express vaccine hesitancy.
Our findings may help explain this. For young people, vaccine non-acceptance may be primarily due to a lack of perceived benefits to their own well-being (outweighed along with perceived costs), as opposed to vaccine hesitancy in all cases.
