Abstract

BackgroundDuring the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, developing safe and effective coronavirus vaccines was considered critical to arresting the spread of the disease. News and social media discussions have extensively covered the issue of coronavirus vaccines, with a mixture of vaccine advocacies, concerns, and oppositions.ObjectiveThis study aimed to uncover the emerging themes in Twitter users’ perceptions and attitudes toward vaccines during the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak.MethodsThis study employed topic modeling to analyze tweets related to coronavirus vaccines at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States (February 21 to March 20, 2020). We created a predefined query (eg, “COVID” AND “vaccine”) to extract the tweet text and metadata (number of followers of the Twitter account and engagement metrics based on likes, comments, and retweeting) from the Meltwater database. After preprocessing the data, we tested Latent Dirichlet Allocation models to identify topics associated with these tweets. The model specifying 20 topics provided the best overall coherence, and each topic was interpreted based on its top associated terms.ResultsIn total, we analyzed 100,209 tweets containing keywords related to coronavirus and vaccines. The 20 topics were further collapsed based on shared similarities, thereby generating 7 major themes. Our analysis characterized 26.3% (26,234/100,209) of the tweets as News Related to Coronavirus and Vaccine Development, 25.4% (25,425/100,209) as General Discussion and Seeking of Information on Coronavirus, 12.9% (12,882/100,209) as Financial Concerns, 12.7% (12,696/100,209) as Venting Negative Emotions, 9.9% (9908/100,209) as Prayers and Calls for Positivity, 8.1% (8155/100,209) as Efficacy of Vaccine and Treatment, and 4.9% (4909/100,209) as Conspiracies about Coronavirus and Its Vaccines. Different themes demonstrated some changes over time, mostly in close association with news or events related to vaccine developments. Twitter users who discussed conspiracy theories, the efficacy of vaccines and treatments, and financial concerns had more followers than those focused on other vaccine themes. The engagement level—the extent to which a tweet being retweeted, quoted, liked, or replied by other users—was similar among different themes, but tweets venting negative emotions yielded the lowest engagement.ConclusionsThis study enriches our understanding of public concerns over new vaccines or vaccine development at early stages of the outbreak, bearing implications for influencing vaccine attitudes and guiding public health efforts to cope with infectious disease outbreaks in the future. This study concluded that public concerns centered on general policy issues related to coronavirus vaccines and that the discussions were considerably mixed with political views when vaccines were not made available. Only a small proportion of tweets focused on conspiracy theories, but these tweets demonstrated high engagement levels and were often contributed by Twitter users with more influence.

Highlights

  • BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has affected more than 200 countries and territories, killed more than 1.2 million people, devastated the global economy, and disrupted the daily life of billions of people [1]

  • This study enriches our understanding of public concerns over new vaccines or vaccine development at early stages of the outbreak, bearing implications for influencing vaccine attitudes and guiding public health efforts to cope with infectious disease outbreaks in the future

  • This study concluded that public concerns centered on general policy issues related to coronavirus vaccines and that the discussions were considerably mixed with political views when vaccines were not made available

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Summary

Introduction

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has affected more than 200 countries and territories, killed more than 1.2 million people, devastated the global economy, and disrupted the daily life of billions of people [1]. Owing to the lack of effective containment measures during the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak, many of those heavily affected placed their hope on the development of coronavirus vaccines. It is crucial to understand media portrayals and public discussions of coronavirus vaccines during the early stages of the outbreak because they influenced policy-making in public health and public perceptions of and attitudes toward vaccination in the later stage [5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, developing safe and effective coronavirus vaccines was considered critical to arresting the spread of the disease. News and social media discussions have extensively covered the issue of coronavirus vaccines, with a mixture of vaccine advocacies, concerns, and oppositions

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