In 2021, more than 60 percent of Poles were against mandatory vaccination against COVID-19.

For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

Vaccination against COVID-19 in Poland began on December 28, 2020. The largest age group that has been vaccinated is the 61-70 age group as of January 2023.

For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

In 2021, 61 percent of Poles surveyed responded that they had been vaccinated against coronavirus (COVID-19) with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, 22 percent had been vaccinated with AstraZeneca, and 12 percent with Moderna. For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

More than 40 percent of Poles agreed that it would be appropriate to start vaccinating children against coronavirus. However, one in three respondents still had no opinion on the matter.

For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

BackgroundDuring the Delta variant COVID-19 wave in Poland there were serious regional differences in vaccination rates and discrepancies in the enforcement of pandemic preventive measures, which allowed us to assess the relative effectiveness of the policies implemented.MethodsCreating a model that would predict mortality based on vaccination rates among the most vulnerable groups and the timing of the wave peak enabled us to calculate to what extent flattening the curve reduced mortality. Subsequently, a model was created to assess which preventive measures delayed the peak of infection waves. Combining those two models allowed us to estimate the relative effectiveness of those measures.ResultsFlattening the infection curve worked: according to our model, each week of postponing the peak of the wave reduced excess deaths by 1.79%. Saving a single life during the Delta wave required one of the following: either the vaccination of 57 high-risk people, or 1,258 low-risk people to build herd immunity, or the isolation of 334 infected individuals for a cumulative period of 10.1 years, or finally quarantining 782 contacts for a cumulative period of 19.3 years.ConclusionsExcept for the most disciplined societies, vaccination of high-risk individuals followed by vaccinating low-risk groups should have been the top priority instead of relying on isolation and quarantine measures which can incur disproportionately higher social costs. Our study demonstrates that even in a country with uniform policies, implementation outcomes varied, highlighting the importance of fine-tuning policies to regional specificity.

The rate of fully vaccinated residents in Poland amounted to roughly 57 per 100 people in January 2023.

For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

Official reports on COVID 19 VSEs in Poland published by the National Sanitary Inspectorate

The data collection consists of 40 qualitative interviews with Polish migrant essential workers living in the UK and 10 in-depth expert interviews with key stakeholders providing information and support to migrant workers in the UK. All migrant interviews are in Polish. Six of the expert interviews with key stakeholders are in English and four are in Polish. Fieldwork was conducted fully online during the Covid-19 pandemic between March and August 2021, following the third UK-wide Covid-19 lockdown. Restrictions were still in place in some localities. Interviews took place shortly after the end of the transition period concluding the UK’s European Union exit on 1 January 2021. All Polish migrant worker interviewees entered the UK before 1 January 2021 and had the option to apply to the EU Settlement Scheme.

The objectives of the qualitative fieldwork were to: 1. To synthesise empirical and theoretical knowledge on the short- and long-term impacts of COVID-19 on migrant essential workers. 2. To establish how the pandemic affected Polish migrant essential worker's lives; and expert interviews with stakeholders in the public and third/voluntary sector to investigate how to best support and retain migrant essential workers in COVID-19 recovery strategies. The project also involved: - co-producing policy outputs with partner organisations in England and Scotland; and - an online survey to measure how Polish migrant essential workers across different roles and sectors were impacted by COVID-19 in regard to health, social, economic and cultural aspects, and intentions to stay in the UK/return to Poland (deposited separately to University of Sheffield). Key findings included significant new knowledge about the health, social, economic and cultural impacts of Covid-19 on migrant essential workers. Polish essential workers were severely impacted by the pandemic with major mental health impacts. Mental health support was insufficient throughout the UK. Those seeking support typically turned to private (online) services from Poland as they felt they could not access them in the UK because of language or cultural barriers, lack of understanding of the healthcare system and pathways to mental health support, support being offered during working hours only, or fear of the negative impact of using mental health services on work opportunities. Some participants were in extreme financial hardship, especially those with pre-settled status or those who arrived in the UK during the pandemic. The reasons for financial strain varied but there were strong patterns linked to increased pressure at work, greater exposure to Covid-19 as well as redundancies, pay cuts and rejected benefit applications. There was a tendency to avoid applying for state financial support. These impacts were compounded by the sense of isolation, helplessness, or long-distance grief due to inability to visit loved ones in Poland. Covid-19 impacted most detrimentally on women with caring responsibilities, single parents and people in the health and teaching sectors. The most vulnerable Polish migrant essential workers - e.g. those on lower income, with pre-existing health conditions, restricted access to support and limited English proficiency - were at most risk. Discrimination was reported, including not feeling treated equally in the workplace. The sense of discrimination two-fold: as essential workers (low-paid, low-status, unsafe jobs) and as Eastern Europeans (frequent disciplining practices, treated as threat, assumed to be less qualified). In terms of future plans, some essential workers intended to leave the UK or were unsure about their future place of residence. Brexit was a major reason for uncertain settlement plans. Vaccine hesitancy was identified, based on doubts about vaccination, especially amongst younger respondents who perceived low risks of Covid-19 for their own health, including women of childbearing age, who may have worries over unknown vaccine side-effects for fertility. Interview participants largely turned to Polish language sources for vaccination information, especially social media, and family and friends in Poland. This promoted the spread of misinformation as Poland has a strong anti-vaccination movement.

COVID-19 has exposed the UK's socio-economic dependence on a chronically insecure migrant essential workforce. While risking their lives to offset the devastating effects of the pandemic, migrant workers reportedly find themselves in precarious professional and personal circumstances (temporary zero-hours contracts, work exploitation, overcrowded accommodation, limited access to adequate health/social services including Universal Credit). This project will investigate the health, social, economic and cultural impacts of COVID-19 on the migrant essential workforce and how these might impact on their continued stay in the UK. It will focus on the largest non-British nationality in the UK, the Polish...

The EU is considering introducing a special passport for the vaccinated. This would allow, among other things, freedom of travel. More than half of Poles supported the introduction of such passports. In contrast, a definite "no" to such a solution said more than 43 percent of respondents in April 2021.

For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

We have acquired the data from George Washington University Libraries Dataverse, the Climate Change Tweets Ids [Data set] . This dataset has been collected from the Twitter API using Social Feed Manager, and totalled to 39,622,026 tweets related to climate change. The tweets were collected between September 21, 2017 and May 17, 2019. However, there is a gap in data collection between January 7, 2019 and April 17, 2019. The tweets with the following hashtags and keywords were scraped: climatechange, #climatechangeisreal, #actonclimate, #globalwarming, #climatechangehoax, #climatedeniers, #climatechangeisfalse, #globalwarminghoax, #climatechangenotreal, climate change, global warming, climate hoax.Due to Twitter's Developer Policy, only the tweet IDs were shared in the database, not the full tweets. Therefore, we had to hydrate the tweet ids with the use of Hydrator application. Hydrating was carried out by us in June, 2020, and it allowed us to obtain 22,564,380 tweets (some tweets or user accounts are deleted or suspended by Twitter in its standard maintenance procedures). Challenges encountered during data hydration included dealing with deleted tweets or suspended user accounts, which is a common occurrence in Twitter's standard maintenance procedures. We addressed this by using the Hydrator application, which allowed us to recover as much data as possible within the constraints of Twitter's Developer Policy.In order to comprehensively diagnose Polish social networks and to enable automated classification of Twitter users in terms of their attitude towards vaccinations, we collected a balanced, importance-wise database of Twitter users for manual annotation. The most important keywords used by groups that spread anti-vaccination propaganda were identified. Using our programming pipeline, databases of Polish social media on the topic of the pandemic and attitudes towards vaccinations were obtained. The raw data contained over 5 million tweets from almost 3600 users with the following hashtags related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland and the war in Ukraine: stopsegregacjisanitarnej, nieszczepimysie, szczepimysie, szczepienie, szczepienia, koronawirus, koronawiruswpolsce, koronawiruspolska, rozliczymysanitarystow, stopss, covid, covid19, sanitaryzm, epidemia, pandemia, plandemia, zelensky, zelenski, wojna, muremzabraunem, konfederacja, wojnanaukrainie, putin, ukraina, ukraine, rosja, russia, wolyn, bandera, upa. Twelve annotators rated the scraped Twitter users based on their posts on a nine-point Likert scale. Samples evaluated by annotators were partially overlapped in order to examine their consistency and reliability. Statistical tests performed on data before and after binning (in three- and two-category versions) confirmed significant annotator agreement. Fleiss' kappa, Randolpha, Kirchendorff alpha, and intracorrelation coefficients indicate non-random agreement among the competent judges (annotators).Our initial data acquisition based on the abovementioned hashtags yielded 5,308,997 posts. To focus specifically on discussions related to COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine, we implemented a filtering process using Polish word stems relevant to these topics. This step reduced our dataset to 4,840,446 posts. The filtering was performed using regular expressions based on lemmatized versions of key terms. For war-related content, we used stems such as 'wojna' (war), 'inwazj' (invasion), 'ukrai' (Ukraine), and 'putin'. For COVID-related content, we used stems like 'mask' (mask), 'szczepi' (vaccine), and 'koronawirus' (coronavirus). This approach allowed us to capture various grammatical forms of these words.Following this initial filtering, we removed three users who had no posts related to either COVID-19 or the war in Ukraine. This step left us with 3,597 users and 4,839,995 posts. Finally, to ensure consistency in our analysis, we selected only posts in the Polish language. This final step resulted in our dataset of 3,577,040 posts from 3,597 users. Before the tweets content analysis was performed, text lemmatization had been performed, special characters, links, and low-importance words based on a stop list (e.g. conjunctions) had been removed.Data preprocessing has been carried out in Python programming language with the use of specific libraries and our original code. The hydrated tweets were further cleaned by removing duplicates and all tweets that had no English language label. Some characters and technical expressions were then replaced with natural language terms (e.g., changing “&” into “and”). We have also created a couple of versions of the database, for various purposes - in some of them we have replaced emoji pictures with their descriptions (using the demoji library and our original code), for other database versions we have removed the emojis, hyperlinks, and special characters. This caused the dataset to comprise 24,083,452 tweets (7,741,602 tweets without retweets), which makes it the biggest database of social media data referring to climate change analyzed to date.We created the social network directed graph with the use of RAPIDS cuGraph library in Python for most of the network statistics calculations, and also with the use of the graph-tool . The final graph visualization was created with the use of Gephi after preparing and filtering the data in Python. The final graph had 4,398,368 nodes and 18,595,472 edges, after removing duplicates and self-loops.The final label of "believer," "denier," or "neutral/unknown" was assigned to users present across annotators through the averaging of results from multiple annotators.In the Ukraine dataset, the term 'anti-group' refers to various tactics of information warfare aimed at discrediting Ukraine's sovereignty and legitimacy, whereas the 'pro-group' consists of tweets that support Ukraine's sovereignty and legitimacy. In the Vaccine dataset, 'anti' denotes a group of users who publish tweets against vaccination, while 'pro' users advocate for vaccination programs. In the Climate Change dataset, 'denier' users dismiss it as a conspiracy theory, while 'believer' users perceive climate change as a serious threat to the future of humanity.For ClimateChange dataset, the creationdate indicates when the connection between two users was established. The user1 and user2 fields are anonymized unique IDs representing the source and target users, respectively. Specifically, user1 is the unique ID of the source, while user2 is the unique ID of the target. The user1status denotes whether user1 is a believer (1), neutral (2), or denier (3). The creationday is a numeric value tied to the creation date. The onset and terminus fields mark the first and last days of any recorded interaction between user1 and user2, respectively, and duration captures the total time they have interacted. Finally, the w field indicates the number of interactions (such as replies, retweets, or direct messages) exchanged between them in a Twitter context.In the Ukraine war and Vaccine dataset, the “createdate” indicates the date of that interaction. The “likecount,” “retweetcount,” “replycount,” and “quotecount” columns capture various engagement metrics on Twitter—how many times a tweet is liked, retweeted, replied to, or quoted. The “user1” and “user2” fields store unique user IDs, whereas “user1proukraine,” “user1provaccine,” “user2proukraine,” and “user2provaccine” denote each user’s stance (e.g., pro, anti, or unknown) regarding Ukraine and vaccines. The “creationday” is a numeric value corresponding to the creation date, while “onset” and “terminus” mark the first and last recorded interactions between user1 and user2, respectively. Finally, “duration” shows the total time span across which these interactions took place.

1. Survey on Poland’s population - methodology
2. Data on global COVID-19 vaccine acceptance

Reports on mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine side effects downloaded from the official websites of the Republic of Poland and National Sanitary Inspectorate in January-February 2021

Data regarding the willingness of patients affected by inborn errors of immunity to accept vaccination against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection are limited. Therefore, this study assessed SARS-CoV-2 vaccination coverage and hesitancy in immunodeficient patients by surveying adults with primary immune deficiencies and autoinflammatory and rheumatic diseases on biologic therapy. The study was conducted from September 20, 2021, to January 22, 2022, when the primary coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccinations were available to all adults in Poland. We included 207 participants consecutively recruited from five referral centers (57% female; median age: 42.6 [range: 18–76, standard deviation ± 14.70] years). Overall, 55% (n = 114), 17% (n = 36), and 28% (n = 57) of the patients had primary immune deficiencies, autoinflammatory diseases, and rheumatic diseases, respectively. Among the entire cohort, 168 patients (81%) were vaccinated, and 82% were willing to receive a booster dose. Patients with autoinflammatory diseases had the highest vaccination rate (94.4%). A strong conviction that it was the correct decision (72%), fear of getting COVID-19 (38%), and expert opinions (34%) influenced the decision to vaccinate. Among the unvaccinated patients, 33.3% had primary or vocational education (p

The industry is an integral part of the pharmaceutical supply chain and the pharmaceutical sector's research and development process, with some of the largest pharma manufacturing companies across the globe being based in Europe. Over the five years through 2024, industry revenue is expected to fall at a compound annual rate of 1% to reach €613 billion, including a fall of 1.5% in 2024. Overall, an ageing population across Europe is widening the available market for manufacturers, with the rising healthcare expenditure of most EU countries supporting the industry. The COVID-19 outbreak skyrocketed the industry’s importance to the functioning of the European economy, with many manufacturers rushing to develop and patent COVID-19 vaccines and other related tests. Spiking hospital admissions during the height of the pandemic heightened demand for various pharmaceutical products. Although EU pharma manufacturers are investing heavily in new treatment research and development, boosting industry growth, they are also facing intense competition from overseas suppliers, particularly from China and India, when it comes to selling intensive-care medical products. Industry revenue is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 4.9% over the five years through 2029 to reach €779.9 billion. The EU reform of the pharmaceuticals framework will address systemic shortages and ensure the security of the supply of critical medicinal products, boosting industry performance. The rising adoption of big data and new manufacturing practices will speed up the commercialisation of different medical treatments, supporting industry performance.

In 2021, among Poles who experienced adverse vaccine reactions after COVID-19 vaccination, 46 percent experienced an increased temperature, while 43 percent experienced arm pain at the injection site. In contrast, among those vaccinated with at least one dose of COVID-19, 14 percent had an increased temperature, and 13 percent had pain in the arm at the injection site. For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

Results from COVID Stress Scales measurement invariance tests across Polish and Dutch samples.

In 2021, nearly nine out of 10 Poles thought that European governments should require pharmaceutical companies to make available their knowledge of COVID-19 vaccines and the technology to produce them.

For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

Results from COVID Stress Scales item response models with parameter constraints across Polish and Dutch samples supported by measurement invariance tests.

In April 2021, there was a large increase in people declaring their intention to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in Poland. Compared to November 2020, the percentage of these individuals increased by nearly 67 percent.

For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

Over 40 percent of Poles do not want to be vaccinated against COVID-19 because the vaccines were developed too quickly and are not sufficiently tested. Seventeen percent of the respondents will not be vaccinated against the coronavirus because they will not get the flu vaccine. Fifteen percent of the population who do not want to be vaccinated believe that a healthy lifestyle is replacing the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.

For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.