Inherent Attitudes or Misplaced Policies? Explaining COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Romania

hesitancy toward COVID-19 vaccines was not particularly high in Romania at the beginning of the vaccination campaign. Nevertheless, the country became one of the laggards in the European Union in terms of vaccination rates. We aim to provide an empirical explanation for this phenomenon based on a representative survey conducted in November–December 2021. We test the influence of various factors on vaccine hesitancy, such as personal experiences with the disease, trust in relevant institutions, general worldviews, and the contact with certain institutions, such as the Romanian Orthodox Church, and general practitioners. Furthermore, we find that three COVID-specific cognitive factors played a crucial role in this respect, namely the evaluation of anti-COVID state measures, belief in COVID-related conspiracy theories, and, especially, fears of negative effects of COVID-19 vaccines. The high explanatory power of these three factors also shows that low vaccination rates were not inevitable consequences of some “inherent” attitudinal characteristics widespread in the Romanian society; on the contrary, vaccine hesitancy has developed as an unfortunate side effect of weak crisis management, as the government and relevant state institutions failed to properly utilize key organizational resources, such as the national network of general practitioners, and proved to be unable to dissipate fears and countervail the spread of conspiracy theories, while emergency measures did not resonate enough among the Romanian public.