Studying Public Perception of Covid-19 Vaccination in Pediatric Age Group: A Sentiment Analysis of Tweets

Abstract

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic in 2019 led to the biggest public health crisis in modern times and triggered a global effort to rapidly develop and deploy covid vaccines. This, in turn, led to a sharply divided opinions in the public about the safety of the vaccines, particularly around vaccine mandates and especially more polarized in children. The goal of this study was to use Twitter sentiment analysis to gauge public attitudes as expressed on social media towards the kids’ vaccination for COVID-19. Methods: To collect data for this sentiment analysis project, the Twitter Application Programming Interface (referred to as “API” from here on) was used to scrape relevant tweets containing the keywords “covid vaccine” and “kids” for the time frame December 2020-December 2022, and the number of tweets to ensure a manageable dataset. The data was then converted into a readable format for further analysis. After data cleaning and preprocessing, we performed sentiment analysis on the-leaned and pre-processed tweets using Text Blob. The results were then visualized using Tableau to clearly and concisely represent the sentiment analysis results and identify any trends or patterns. Results: The sentiment analysis showed that overall, 48% of tweets scored a positive sentiment, while only 21% had a negative sentiment, with 31% neutral. Over 50% of the tweets were from the USA, with India having the next highest number of tweets based on location. Verified users accounted for only 17% of the tweets. Conclusion: The positive sentiment towards the COVID-19 vaccine and kids suggests that there is a general acceptance and support for the vaccine among the public. Public perception tends to correlate with the perception of risk and fear, as well as with media efforts aimed at promoting vaccination adoption.