Vaccine hesitancy, defined as a delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite their availability, was mentioned by the World Health Organization as one of the top 10 threats to public health in 2019. This has led to increased concern, mistrust, and confusion surrounding COVID-19 vaccination.ĭespite the massive undertaking of vaccine development, a vaccination program is only as successful as its uptake.
Vaccine production cannot meet demand, requiring rollout plans for targeted subpopulations, and there are several types of COVID-19 vaccines being used within one country. The intricacy surrounding COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy appears to be further reaching and fundamentally different than other immunizations. Due to the critical need, the speed of vaccine development, production, and mass rollout has been faster than ever seen before, leading to concerns about vaccine efficacy and safety. As transmission of COVID-19 continues around the globe, a COVID-19 vaccine is an important and valuable tool to reduce the spread of infection.
The COVID-19 pandemic is emerging as one of the greatest public health threats in history, with over 140 million infections and 3 million deaths worldwide attributed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus as of April 2021. The themes of safety, efficacy, and trust in institutions will need to be considered, as targeted outreach programs and intervention strategies are deployed on Twitter to improve the uptake of COVID-19 vaccination. Nearly one-third (45,628/146,191, 31.2%) of the conversations on COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy clusters expressed concerns for freedom or mistrust of institutions (either the government or multinational corporations) and nearly a quarter (34,756/146,191, 23.8%) expressed criticism toward the government’s handling of the pandemic.Ĭonclusions: Social media content analysis combined with social network analysis provides insights into the themes of the vaccination conversation on Twitter. The conversation around efficacy was that vaccines were unlikely to completely rid the population of COVID-19, polymerase chain reaction testing is flawed, and there is no indication of long-term T-cell immunity for COVID-19. A main theme was the safety and efficacy of mRNA technology and side effects. Results: The tweets (n=636,516) identified that the main themes driving the vaccine hesitancy conversation were concerns of safety, efficacy, and freedom, and mistrust in institutions (either the government or multinational corporations). Based on the SNA results, an unsupervised machine learning approach to natural language processing using a sentence-level algorithm transfer function to detect semantic textual similarity was performed in order to identify the main themes of vaccine hesitancy. SNA was used to identify social media clusters expressing mistrustful opinions on COVID-19 vaccination. Tweets published in English and French were collected through the Twitter application programming interface between November 19 and 26, 2020, just following the announcement of initial COVID-19 vaccine trials. Methods: Social network analysis (SNA) and unsupervised machine learning were used to characterize COVID-19 vaccine content on Twitter globally. Objective: We aimed to evaluate societal attitudes, communication trends, and barriers to COVID-19 vaccine uptake through social media content analysis to inform communication strategies promoting vaccine acceptance. The first step toward influencing attitudes about immunization is understanding the current patterns of communication that characterize the immunization debate on social media platforms. Attitudes on vaccines are largely driven by online information, particularly information on social media. COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is fundamentally different from that of other vaccines due to the new technologies being used, rapid development, and widespread global distribution.
School of Public Policy and Department of Political Scienceīackground: The rollout of COVID-19 vaccines has brought vaccine hesitancy to the forefront in managing this pandemic.