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Background This study investigated the determinants of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine hesitancy among healthcare workers (HCWs) in Cameroon and Nigeria. Methods This analytic cross-sectional study was conducted from May to June 2021, including consenting HCWs aged ≥18 y identified using snowball sampling. Vaccine hesitancy was defined as indecisiveness or unwillingness to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Multilevel logistic regression yielded adjusted ORs (aORs) for vaccine hesitancy. Results We included a total of 598 (about 60% women) participants. Little or no trust in the approved COVID-19 vaccines (aOR=2.28, 95% CI 1.24 to 4.20), lower perception of the importance of the vaccine on their personal health (5.26, 2.38 to 11.6), greater concerns about vaccine-related adverse effects (3.45, 1.83 to 6.47) and uncertainty about colleagues' acceptability of the vaccine (2.98, 1.62 to 5.48) were associated with higher odds of vaccine hesitancy. In addition, participants with chronic disease (aOR=0.34, 95% CI 0.12 to 0.97) and higher levels of concerns about getting COVID-19 (0.40, 0.18 to 0.87) were less likely to be hesitant to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Conclusions COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among HCWs in this study was high and broadly determined by the perceived risk of COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines on personal health, mistrust in COVID-19 vaccines and uncertainty about colleagues' vaccine acceptability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study assessed Africa's child survival gains and prospects for attaining Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) target 3.2. We analysed multiple country-level secondary datasets of 54 African countries and presented spatial analysis. Results showed that only 8 out of the 54 African countries have achieved substantial reductions in under-5 mortality with an under-five mortality rate (U5MR) of 25 deaths per 1,000 live births or less. Many countries are far from achieving this target. Results of the predictions using supervised machine learning on the Bayesian network reveal that the probability of achieving the SDG target 3.2 (i.e., having U5MR of 25 deaths per 1000 live births or less) increases (from 21.6% to 100%) when the contraceptive prevalence increases from 49.8% to 78.5%; and the use of skilled birth attendants increases from 44.8% to 86.3%; and percentage of secondary school completion of female increases from 42.5 to 74.0%. Our results from Local indicator of spatial autocorrelation (LISA) cluster maps show that 7 countries (mainly in West/Central Africa) formed the high-high clusters (hotspots for U5M) and may not achieve the SDG target 3.2 unless urgent and appropriate investments are deployed. As 2030 approaches, there is a need to address the problem of limited access to quality health care, female illiteracy, limited access to safe water, and poor access to quality family planning services, particularly across many sub-Saharan African countries., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2024 Adedini et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)