Information Seeking Behavior on Covid-19 Vaccine among Residents of Fagge Local Government Area of Kano, Nigeria

Abstract

Abstract In Northern Nigeria, distrust jeopardizes the coronavirus response. On April 11, 2020, after World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the Covid-19 pandemic, Kano State confirmed its first positive Covid-19 case. In the same month, the state witnessed what was described as mysterious deaths, claiming hundreds of lives. Many people in the state believe that Covid-19 is a scam and a grand plot vaccine to reduce population and the government is using it to generate money, which made them rebuff the Covid-19 vaccine. In a state like Kano which was once the epicenter of the disease in Northern Nigeria, the resistance to the Covid-19 vaccine in the state pause a great danger in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic. Within this context, this study examined information-seeking behavior on the Covid-19 vaccine among residents of the Fagge Local Government Area of Kano State. The study adopts the positivist approach of research design where a survey was used to generate data using a questionnaire. Simple random sampling was used to select the respondents using Taro Yamane’s formula to arrive at a sample size of 400. Based on the findings, the data indicates that social media constitute the major source of information for the Covid-19 vaccine in Fagge local government. The majority of the respondents in Fagge LGA are not satisfied with the information received on the Covid-19 vaccine. The data also indicates that the outcome of information-seeking behavior on the Covid-19 vaccine in Fagge LGA is significantly discouraging. The study concludes that the Health Believe Model can suitably be used and applied in the cases of contextualizing public behavior as regard to their information-seeking behavior using media messages towards the vaccine. This will greatly help in evaluating the implications of the public information-seeking behavior towards the Covid-19 vaccine.