Abstract
As the Covid-19 pandemic is a global threat to health that few can fully escape, it has provided a unique opportunity to study international reactions to a common problem. Such reactions can be partly obtained from public posts to Twitter, allowing investigations of changes in interest over time. This study analysed English-language Covid-19 tweets mentioning cures, treatments, or vaccines from 1 January 2020 to 8 April 2021, seeking trends and international differences. The results have methodological limitations but show a tendency for countries with a lower human development index score to tweet more about cures, although they were a minor topic for all countries. Vaccines were discussed about as much as treatments until July 2020, when they generated more interest because of developments in Russia. The November 2020 Pfizer-BioNTech preliminary Phase 3 trials results generated an immediate and sustained sharp increase, however, followed by a continuing roughly linear increase in interest for vaccines until at least April 2021. Against this background, national deviations from the average were triggered by country-specific news about cures, treatments, or vaccines. Nevertheless, interest in vaccines in all countries increased in parallel to some extent, despite substantial international differences in national regulatory approval and availability. The results also highlight that unsubstantiated claims about alternative medicine remedies gained traction in several countries, apparently posing a threat to public health.
Highlights
Given the known international differences in attitudes towards medicine, the dual aims of this article are to assess whether tweets can shed light on international differences in attitudes towards potential biomedical or alternative Covid-19 cures, treatments, and vaccines, and to seek insights into international differences in attention given to these three issues during the pandemic
Twitter removes some spam from its feed and archive, the tweets gathered were pre-processed to reduce the influence of any remaining spam and prevent the results from being dominated by individual prolific tweeters
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine phase 3 trial success subsequently created by far the largest spike, leading to a substantially higher level of interest in vaccines. This increased steadily afterwards, with spikes presumably associating with similar announcement for other vaccines as well as regulatory approval and rollout announcements. This example illustrates that social media data is useful for identifying trends in public interest retrospectively (Thelwall 2007), confirming that there was a low level of interest in vaccines in the early stages of the pandemic
Summary
It was not known whether it would be possible to develop a cure for it, in the sense of a medicine that would kill the virus. Explorations of international differences may shed light onto national beliefs that may influence the acceptance of health recommendations, such as vaccination, as well as adherence to safety measures, such as social distancing. This comparison may give a new perspective from which to investigate a social aspect of the Covid-19 pandemic. Most people in most countries probably believe that inequalities in access to healthcare is unfair (von dem Knesebeck et al 2016), despite substantial differences between and within countries (e.g., Balarajan et al 2011), giving an additional incentive for international comparisons
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