The association of COVID-19 vaccine availability with mental health among adults in the United States

Chan Shen; Lucy Rashiwala; R Constance Wiener; Patricia A Findley; Hao Wang; Usha Sambamoorthi

doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2022.970007

The association of COVID-19 vaccine availability with mental health among adults in the United States

Front Psychiatry. 2022 Aug 9:13:970007. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2022.970007. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Chan Shen¹, Lucy Rashiwala², R Constance Wiener³, Patricia A Findley⁴, Hao Wang⁵, Usha Sambamoorthi²

Affiliations

¹ Departments of Surgery and Public Health Sciences, Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey, PA, United States.
² Department of Pharmacotherapy, College of Pharmacy, University of North Texas Health Science Center, Fort Worth, TX, United States.
³ Department of Dental Public Health and Professional Practice, School of Dentistry, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, United States.
⁴ Rutgers School of Social Work, New Brunswick, NJ, United States.
⁵ Department of Emergency Medicine, JPS Health Network, Integrative Emergency Services, Fort Worth, TX, United States.

Abstract

Objective: To assess whether COVID-19 vaccine approval and availability was associated with reduction in the prevalence of depression and anxiety among adults in the United States.

Methods: We adopted cross sectional and quasi-experimental design with mental health measurements before vaccine availability (June 2020, N = 68,009) and after vaccine availability (March 2021, N = 63,932) using data from Census Pulse Survey. Depression and anxiety were derived from PHQ-2 and GAD-2 questionnaires. We compared rates of depression and anxiety between June 2020 and March 2021. Unadjusted and adjusted analysis with replicate weights were conducted.

Results: Depression prevalence was 25.0% in June 2020 and 24.6% in March 2021; anxiety prevalence was 31.7% in June 2020 and 30.0% in March 2021 in the sample. In adjusted analysis, there were no significant differences in likelihood of depression and anxiety between June 2020 and March 2021.

Conclusion: Depression and anxiety were not significantly different between June 2020 and March 2021, which suggests that the pandemic effect continues to persist even with widespread availability of vaccines.

Keywords: COVID-19; Census pulse survey; anxiety; depression; vaccine availability.