Abstract
In July 2021, breakthrough cases were reported in the outbreak of COVID-19 in Nanjing, sparking concern and discussion about the vaccine’s effectiveness and becoming a trending topic on Sina Weibo. In order to explore public attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccine and their emotional orientations, we collected 1542 posts under the trending topic through data mining. We set up four categories of attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines, and used a big data analysis tool to code and manually checked the coding results to complete the content analysis. The results showed that 45.14% of the Weibo posts (n = 1542) supported the COVID-19 vaccine, 12.97% were neutral, and 7.26% were doubtful, which indicated that the public did not question the vaccine’s effectiveness due to the breakthrough cases in Nanjing. There were 66.47% posts that reflected significant negative emotions. Among these, 50.44% of posts with negative emotions were directed towards the media, 25.07% towards the posting users, and 11.51% towards the public, which indicated that the negative emotions were not directed towards the COVID-19 vaccine. External sources outside the vaccine might cause vaccine hesitancy. Public opinions expressed in online media reflect the public’s cognition and attitude towards vaccines and their core needs in terms of information. Therefore, online public opinion monitoring could be an essential way to understand the opinions and attitudes towards public health issues.
Highlights
On 20 July 2021, nine confirmed cases were detected at Nanjing Lukou International Airport during routine nucleic acid tests on staff [3], which triggered a regional outbreak of COVID-19 in Nanjing, the capital city of East China’s
Under the context of the breakthrough cases occurring in the Nanjing outbreak, this study aimed to explore public perceptions of vaccine effectiveness and examine whether this wave of the epidemic influenced vaccine hesitancy and distrust
This study suggested that online public opinion monitoring is an effective channel to track public opinions
Summary
The Breakthrough Cases in the Nanjing Outbreak and COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy. China has implemented strict measures to respond to the epidemic since the outbreak of COVID-19, which enabled the epidemic to be placed under control [1]. On 20 July 2021, nine confirmed cases were detected at Nanjing Lukou International Airport during routine nucleic acid tests on staff [3], which triggered a regional outbreak of COVID-19 in Nanjing, the capital city of East China’s. The epidemic spread from Nanjing to other cities of China rapidly as the airport was the origin of the confirmed cases. The latest outbreak in Nanjing has spread to 16 provinces, and over 400 infections have been reported up to 3 August 2021 [4]
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