Our latest research has found that people with certain mental illnesses were significantly more likely to get vaccinated against COVID-19 than the general population.

There have been calls around the world for people with more severe mental illnesses to take priority when it comes to rolling out vaccination plans. Using the Greater Manchester Care Record, a shared care record for 2.8 million people, we compared vaccination rates in a sample of 1,152,831 adults with and without severe mental illness.

The proportion of people who received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine by 30^th June 2021, as recorded in their primary care records, was 77% for people with recurrent major depression, 76% for people with bipolar disorder, 75% for other depressive disorders, and 70% for psychotic disorders, compared to 68.4% for people not diagnosed with severe mental illness.

However, when we looked at records of who had refused a COVID-19 vaccine, people diagnosed with schizophrenia were more than twice as likely to refuse vaccination compared to people not diagnosed with severe mental illness (5% versus 2%). While the reasons for this are not clear, explanations could range from a heightened vaccine hesitancy among people with severe mental illness to reflecting that health care professionals may have more actively offered, discussed and/or recorded attempts to promote vaccination with people with severe mental illness.

The study formed part of our broader programme of work looking at COVID-19 outcomes among people with mental illness. We have already shown that people with schizophrenia are 5 times more likely to die due to COVID-19. By highlighting differences in vaccination uptake and refusal among people with different diagnoses, this latest paper takes another step towards showing where further work may need to be done to protect people with mental illness from COVID-19.

By Dr Lamiece Hassan, Research Fellow, University of Manchester lamiece.hassan@manchester.ac.uk

Written by Dr Lamiece Hassan

Further reading

COVID-19 vaccination uptake in people with severe mental illness: a UK-based cohort study. Link to full paper (no paywall): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wps.20945

Disparities in COVID-19 infection, hospitalisation and death in people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder: a cohort study of the UK Biobank. Link to full paper (no paywall): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-021-01344-2

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