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Master of Public Health

Spatiotemporal trends in COVID-19 vaccine sentiments on a social media platform and correlations with reported vaccine coverage

AUTHORS

Zhou X , Zhang X , Larson HJ , de Figueiredo A , Jit M , Fodeh S , Vermund SH , Zang S , Lin L , Hou Z , . Bulletin of the World Health Organization. 2023 10 31; 102(1). 32-45

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: To assess spatiotemporal trends in, and determinants of, the acceptance of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination globally, as expressed on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter).

METHODS: We collected over 13 million posts on the platform regarding COVID-19 vaccination made between November 2020 and March 2022 in 90 languages. Multilingual deep learning XLM-RoBERTa models annotated all posts using an annotation framework after being fine-tuned on 8125 manually annotated, English-language posts. The annotation results were used to assess spatiotemporal trends in COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and confidence as expressed by platform users in 135 countries and territories. We identified associations between spatiotemporal trends in vaccine acceptance and country-level characteristics and public policies by using univariate and multivariate regression analysis.

FINDINGS: A greater proportion of platform users in the World Health Organization’s South-East Asia, Eastern Mediterranean and Western Pacific Regions expressed vaccine acceptance than users in the rest of the world. Countries in which a greater proportion of platform users expressed vaccine acceptance had higher COVID-19 vaccine coverage rates. Trust in government was also associated with greater vaccine acceptance. Internationally, vaccine acceptance and confidence declined among platform users as: (i) vaccination eligibility was extended to adolescents; (ii) vaccine supplies became sufficient; (iii) nonpharmaceutical interventions were relaxed; and (iv) global reports on adverse events following vaccination appeared.

CONCLUSION: Social media listening could provide an effective and expeditious means of informing public health policies during pandemics, and could supplement existing public health surveillance approaches in addressing global health issues.

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