ArticleSocial science & medicine (1982)2023
The COVID-19 curtain: Can past communist regimes explain the vaccination divide in Europe?
Article in Social science & medicine (1982), 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- The impact of national context on COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy across Europe.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Widening East-West inequality in life expectancy in Europe during the COVID-19 pandemic: An international comparative study.PloS one · 2026Article
- The associations between childhood vaccine history and COVID-19 vaccine uptake among older adults in 28 high-income countries.Research square · 2025Article
- Vaccination readiness and political party preference in Germany: Trust, collective responsibility, and the populist radical right.PloS one · 2025Article
- Parental doubts regarding childhood vaccinations after the COVID-19 pandemic: a qualitative study from Poland.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Factors associated with COVID-19 vaccination rates in countries with different income levels: a panel analysis.BMC public health · 2024Article
- Childhood Mandatory Vaccinations: Current Situation in European Countries and Changes Occurred from 2014 to 2024.Vaccines · 2024Review
- Culture and political regimes: How have they influenced the effectiveness of COVID-19 response policy?Heliyon · 2024Article
- Trust and Support for Cancer Research Biobanks: Insights from Cancer Patients in Poland.Medical science monitor : international medical journal of experimental and clinical research · 2024Article
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- Heritage and hesitancy: how preference for traditional Chinese medicine influences vaccine attitudes.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- What accounts for the variation in COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in Eastern, Southern and Western Europe?Vaccine · 2023Article
- Communism's Lasting Effect? Former Communist States and COVID-19 Vaccinations.Cross-cultural research : official journal of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research · 2023Article
- The effect of altruism on COVID-19 vaccination rates.Health economics review · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
As of December 2021, all former Communist countries from Central and Eastern Europe were still lagging behind in terms of COVID-19 vaccination rates in Europe. Can institutional legacy explain, at least in part, this heterogeneity in vaccination decisions across Europe? To study this question we exploit novel data from the second wave of the SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe) COVID-19 Survey fielded in Summer (2021) that covers older individuals in 27 European countries. First, we document lower COVID-19 vaccine take-up amongst those who were born under Communism in Europe. Next, we turn to reunified Germany to get closer to a causal effect of having lived behind the Iron Curtain. We find that exposure to the Communist regime in East Germany decreased one's probability to get vaccinated against COVID-19 by 8 percentage points and increased that of refusing the vaccine by 4 percentage points. Both effects are large and statistically significant, and they hold when controlling for individual socio-economic and demographic characteristics. We explore several possible mechanisms. The East-West Germany gap does not seem to be explained by differences in the impact of the first wave of the pandemic or in general exposure to vaccines. We find that East Germans have lower social capital than West Germans and that social capital correlates negatively with Covid-10 vaccine uptake, but only a small fraction of the East-West Germany Covid-19 vaccination gap can be explained by our measures of social capital.
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