An overwhelming majority of Dutch people have no regrets about being vaccinated against coronavirus during the pandemic, research by AD.nl has found.

The media organisation carried out two surveys, a representative poll of 1,000 people by Panel Inzicht and an online questionnaire that attracted 6,000 responses.

In the first poll some 3% of people who received at least one vaccine said they felt they had made the wrong choice.

Some fell ill with Covid-19 despite being immunised, while others developed side-effects from the vaccine, such as Guillian-Barré Syndrome, a muscular condition that includes tingling in the feet and hands and can lead to heart problems.

One respondent who caught the infection after two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine said: “It felt like a bad flu, but I wasn’t protected against it. All in all I regret exposing myself to an experimental vaccine under false pretences.”

Around 85% of people over the age of 12 had the initial two doses of the coronavirus vaccine, or a single dose in the case of the Janssen shot. Some people were motivated by the fact that public events or international travel were restricted to people who could prove they were fully vaccinated.

Word of the year

Prikspijt, the Dutch word for vaccine regret, was named as word of the year in 2021, but dictionary publisher Van Dale said its annual competition had been hijacked by anti-vaccine campaigners.

Immunologists said after studying the effect of 99 million coronavirus vaccines that the AstraZeneca jab tripled the risk of developing Guillian-Barré Syndrome, while the Pfizer and Modena vaccines made conditions such as pericarditis, an inflammation of the lining around the heart, more likely.

However, the raw numbers remained small – 190 cases of Guillian-Barré Syndrome were detected altogether – and in each case the risk was higher still among people who had developed a Covid-19 infection.