UniCoVac October 2021 COVID-19 Student Survey

University students are a major target population for infectious disease prevention programmes. Understanding the barriers to implementation of these programmes, and specifically vaccines, among student populations is critical to effective health prevention strategies. To assess changes in COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and vaccine delivery programmes, we compared questionnaire-based survey data of two cohorts of first year students from two points, July and October 2021, during the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in the United Kingdom. We observed a highly significant increase in vaccine uptake without any alteration in vaccine hesitancy as measured using a modified VAX score between the two survey dates. The October survey confirmed an association of vaccine hesitancy with the Non-White ethnic group and specifically identified concerns with the plurality of vaccine testing as a potential cause of this hesitancy. University pop-ups for COVID-19 vaccine delivery were not extensively utilised but were deemed as strongly or weakly favourable by 28.3% of students. Survey responses indicated that on campus pop-ups for delivery of MMR and MenACWY were also supported by a significant minority of students.Four files are contained within this dataset. These are as follows:-UniCoVac_OCT_2021_Undergraduate_Data-11122025-ver3.xlsx; this file contains the raw data (All_Questions worksheet) from the survey performed in October 2021 with University of Leicester undergraduates. Specific identifiers have been removed from the dataset as indicated in the Notes worksheet of this file. Other worksheets contains subsets of this data for ease of reference.UniCoVac_Questionnaire_Participant_Info_Sheet.doc. This file contains the.participant information sheet that was read by all students prior to answering the survey questions.UniCoVac_Questionnaire-October-2021-final version-20102021.doc; this file contains the questions that were provided to the students on online survey platformUniCoVac-Questionnaire_email-invitation-ver7-20-10-2021; this file contains the text of the email sent to students with the information about the survey and a unique link to the survey questions