Examining Vaccine Sentiment on Twitter and Local Vaccine Deployment during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Lourdes S Martinez; Matthew W Savage; Elisabeth Jones; Elizabeth Mikita; Varun Yadav; Ming-Hsiang Tsou

doi:10.3390/ijerph20010354

Examining Vaccine Sentiment on Twitter and Local Vaccine Deployment during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Dec 26;20(1):354. doi: 10.3390/ijerph20010354.

Authors

Lourdes S Martinez¹, Matthew W Savage¹, Elisabeth Jones², Elizabeth Mikita³, Varun Yadav⁴, Ming-Hsiang Tsou⁵

Affiliations

¹ School of Communication, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA.
² College of Arts and Letters, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA.
³ School of Public Health, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA.
⁴ Department of Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego, CA 92093, USA.
⁵ Department of Geography, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA.

Abstract

Understanding local public attitudes toward receiving vaccines is vital to successful vaccine campaigns. Social media platforms may help uncover vaccine sentiments during infectious disease outbreaks at the local level, and whether offline local events support vaccine-promotion efforts. Communication Infrastructure Theory (CIT) served as a guiding framework for this case study of the San Diego region examining local public sentiment toward vaccines expressed on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic. We performed a sentiment analysis (including positivity and subjectivity) of 187,349 tweets gathered from May 2020 to March 2021, and examined how sentiment corresponded with local vaccine deployment. The months of November and December (52.9%) 2020 saw a majority of tweets expressing positive sentiment and coincided with announcements of offline local events signaling San Diego's imminent deployment of COVID-19 vaccines. Across all months, tweets remained mostly objective (never falling below 63%). In terms of CIT, considering multiple levels of the Story Telling Network in online spaces, and examining sentiment about vaccines on Twitter may help scholars to explore the Communication Action Context, as well as cultivate positive community attitudes to improve the Field of Health Action regarding vaccines. Real-time analysis of local tweets during development and deployment of new vaccines may help monitor local public responses and guide promotion of immunizations in communities.

Keywords: COVID-19; Communication Infrastructure Theory; Twitter; sentiment; vaccines.

Publication types

Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

Attitude
COVID-19 Vaccines
COVID-19* / epidemiology
COVID-19* / prevention & control
Humans
Pandemics / prevention & control
Social Media*
Vaccines*

Substances

COVID-19 Vaccines
Vaccines

Grants and funding

This material is partially based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1416509, IBSS project titled “Spatiotemporal Modeling of Human Dynamics Across Social Media and Social Networks”. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.