Abstract
BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a large, initially uncontrollable, public health crisis both in the United States and across the world, with experts looking to vaccines as the ultimate mechanism of defense. The development and deployment of COVID-19 vaccines have been rapidly advancing via global efforts. Hence, it is crucial for governments, public health officials, and policy makers to understand public attitudes and opinions towards vaccines, such that effective interventions and educational campaigns can be designed to promote vaccine acceptance.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to investigate public opinion and perception on COVID-19 vaccines in the United States. We investigated the spatiotemporal trends of public sentiment and emotion towards COVID-19 vaccines and analyzed how such trends relate to popular topics found on Twitter.MethodsWe collected over 300,000 geotagged tweets in the United States from March 1, 2020 to February 28, 2021. We examined the spatiotemporal patterns of public sentiment and emotion over time at both national and state scales and identified 3 phases along the pandemic timeline with sharp changes in public sentiment and emotion. Using sentiment analysis, emotion analysis (with cloud mapping of keywords), and topic modeling, we further identified 11 key events and major topics as the potential drivers to such changes.ResultsAn increasing trend in positive sentiment in conjunction with a decrease in negative sentiment were generally observed in most states, reflecting the rising confidence and anticipation of the public towards vaccines. The overall tendency of the 8 types of emotion implies that the public trusts and anticipates the vaccine. This is accompanied by a mixture of fear, sadness, and anger. Critical social or international events or announcements by political leaders and authorities may have potential impacts on public opinion towards vaccines. These factors help identify underlying themes and validate insights from the analysis.ConclusionsThe analyses of near real-time social media big data benefit public health authorities by enabling them to monitor public attitudes and opinions towards vaccine-related information in a geo-aware manner, address the concerns of vaccine skeptics, and promote the confidence that individuals within a certain region or community have towards vaccines.
Highlights
As of May 21, 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic had led to more than 160 million confirmed cases and more than 3 million deaths worldwide [1]
Since January 2020, scientists and medical experts around the world have been developing and testing COVID-19 vaccines; 16 vaccines have been approved for emergency use around the world so far, but the progress of vaccination has been subject to hesitancy, distrust, and debate
We generalized the variations of COVID-related terms to “COVID-19,” including “corona,” “covid,” “covid19,” and “coronavirus”; second, we removed unrelated website links from the search results, including links starting with the fragment of “https”; third, we removed punctuation and other key symbols and converted capital letters into lower-case letters; fourth, we removed inflectional endings and reverted words to their root or dictionary form, by employing the word lemmatization function provided in the Python package Natural Language Toolkit 3.6.2 [27]
Summary
As of May 21, 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic had led to more than 160 million confirmed cases and more than 3 million deaths worldwide [1]. Vaccine hesitancy was identified by the World Health Organization as one of the top 10 global health threats in 2019 [5]. In many countries, such hesitancy, along with vaccine misinformation, have presented substantial obstacles towards vaccinating a sufficient amount of the population in order to establish herd immunity [6,7]. The development and deployment of COVID-19 vaccines have been rapidly advancing via global efforts. It is crucial for governments, public health officials, and policy makers to understand public attitudes and opinions towards vaccines, such that effective interventions and educational campaigns can be designed to promote vaccine acceptance
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