Individuals form their risk perceptions using the information set available to them and their individual circumstances , like their age , gender or education . As our analytical framework indicates with equations ( 1 ) and ( 2 ) , these risk perceptions , mediated by other factors such as trust and social norms , drive vaccine behavior . While it is out of the scope of this paper to provide a detailed analysis of the formation of risk perceptions , the data allows to have a preliminary look at the relationship between vaccine acceptance and risk perceptions about COVID-19 infection . The survey we use includes a question on the likelihood that a person of the same age and in the same community as the respondent becomes sick from COVID-19 . We create a dummy variable that indicates whether a respondent stated that this event was " very " or " extremely likely " . We call this variable the " perception of high risk of infection " . Columns 1 and 2 of Table 3 correspond to equation ( 2 ) of our framework and look at the correlations between risk perceptions and information and individual characteristics . Men , people living in rural areas , and younger individuals have all a perception of a lower risk of becoming sick from COVID-19 . People in good health perceive their risk to be low as well . Interestingly , individual beliefs appear to be associated to risk perceptions in an unusual direction : individuals who have higher trust in government health authorities and those who believe that many individuals in their community will accept the vaccine also report higher Standard errors in parentheses clustered at country level . All estimations include country and month fixed effects . Reference category for age is age 81 - 90 and reference category for education is tertiary education . * p < 0.05 * * p < 0.01 * * * p < 0.001 .