VCU news

By VCU News staff

Jeanine Guidry, Ph.D., an affiliate faculty member at the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the School of Population Health and at the Richard T. Robertson School of Media and Culture in the College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University, is the recipient of the  APIC/AJIC Award for Publication Excellence for her study “Willingness to Get the COVID Vaccine With and Without Emergency Use Approval.”

The award recognizes an author who has published an article in the American Journal of Infection Control which was widely read and cited during the previous year. 

Guidry's study, conducted at VCU with colleagues Linnea Laestadius, Ph.D.; Emily Vraga, Ph.D.; Carrie Miller, Ph.D.; Paul Perrin, Ph.D.; Candace Burton, Ph.D.; Mark Ryan, M.D.; Bernard Fuemmeler, Ph.D.; and Kellie Carlyle, Ph.D., involved a July 2020 survey of 788 adults that found that 59.9% of respondents were definitely or probably planning to receive a future coronavirus vaccine, but fewer than half of respondents planned to get it under emergency use authorization. It also found that white people were more likely than Black people to be vaccinated.

“With the ongoing presence of COVID-19 in our society, the risk of long COVID and the long-term threat of vaccine hesitancy, continuing to improve our understanding of why people may or may not vaccinate is of great importance,” said Guidry, who is now a faculty member at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. “My co-authors and I are grateful for APIC/AJIC’s support and commitment to deeper understanding in this field.”