Abstract
Social media allow anti-vaxxers to quickly spread misinformation and false statements. This situation may lead to an increase in vaccine hesitancy. We wanted to characterize what arguments against COVID-19 vaccines run on Facebook in Poland. We analyzed Facebook comments related to the five events of the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines—announcements of the efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech (09.11.2020), Moderna (16.11.2020), and AstraZeneca (23.11.2020) vaccines, registration of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine by the European Medicines Agency (21.12.2020), and the first vaccination in Poland (27.12.2020). We collected the comments from fanpages of the biggest Polish media and then established their main anti-vaccine themes. We found that the negative arguments about COVID-19 vaccines can be divided into 12 categories. Seven of them are universal and also apply to other vaccines but five are new and COVID-19’ specific. The frequency of arguments from a given category varied over time. We also noticed that, while the comments were mostly negative, the reactions were positive. Created codebook of anti-vaccine COVID-19 arguments can be used to monitor the attitude of society towards COVID-19 vaccines. Real-time monitoring of social media is important because the popularity of certain arguments on Facebook changes rapidly over time.
Highlights
IntroductionSocial media provide great opportunities for sharing convictions and opinions
We focused on comments published in the response to the news published on Polish media fanpages, describing COVID-19 vaccines’ development
We found that negative COVID-19 vaccine comments can be divided into 12 categories
Summary
Social media provide great opportunities for sharing convictions and opinions. There is a place for conspiracy theories. Almost half of the health content published on social media contains misinformation [1]. The subject of vaccinations and infectious diseases is, next to oncological topics, the most frequently misrepresented in social media [2]. For these reasons, social media are currently regarded as the main communication tool for people with anti-vaccine attitudes [3,4]
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