Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2021 Jul:108:256-262.
doi: 10.1016/j.ijid.2021.05.059. Epub 2021 May 27.

An analysis of COVID-19 vaccine sentiments and opinions on Twitter

Samira Yousefinaghani  1 , Rozita Dara  2 , Samira Mubareka  3 , Andrew Papadopoulos  4 , Shayan Sharif  5
Affiliations

An analysis of COVID-19 vaccine sentiments and opinions on Twitter

Samira Yousefinaghani et al. Int J Infect Dis. 2021 Jul.

Abstract

Objective: We identified public sentiments and opinions toward the COVID-19 vaccines based on the content of Twitter.

Materials and methods: We retrieved 4,552,652 publicly available tweets posted within the timeline of January 2020 to January 2021. Following extraction, we identified vaccine sentiments and opinions of tweets and compared their progression by time, geographical distribution, main themes, keywords, posts engagement metrics and accounts characteristics.

Results: We found a slight difference in the prevalence of positive and negative sentiments, with positive being the dominant polarity and having higher engagements. The amount of discussion on vaccine rejection and hesitancy was more than interest in vaccines during the course of the study, but the pattern was different in various countries. We found the accounts producing vaccine opposition content were partly Twitter bots or political activists while well-known individuals and organizations generated the content in favour of vaccination.

Conclusion: Understanding sentiments and opinions toward vaccination using Twitter may help public health agencies to increase positive messaging and eliminate opposing messages in order to enhance vaccine uptake.

Keywords: Communicable diseases; Social media; Text mining; Vaccine.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Distribution of COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Distribution of sentiment polarities of tweets.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Evolution of public's sentiments toward vaccination in Twitter.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Negative posts regarding vaccine brands.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Evolution of vaccine opinions in Twitter.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Evolution of vaccine opinions across countries.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Abd Rahim N., Rafie S.M. Sentiment analysis of social media data in vaccination. Int J. 2020;8(9)
    1. Aguas R., Corder R.M., King J.G., Goncalves G., Ferreira M.U., Gomes M.G.M. Herd immunity thresholds for SARS-CoV-2 estimated from unfolding epidemics. medRxiv. 2020
    1. Bello-Orgaz G., Hernandez-Castro J., Camacho D. Detecting discussion communities on vaccination in twitter. Future Gen Comput Syst. 2017;66:125–136.
    1. Bonnevie E., Gallegos-Jeffrey A., Goldbarg J., Byrd B., Smyser J. Quantifying the rise of vaccine opposition on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic. J Commun Healthc. 2020:1–8.
    1. Bonnevie E., Goldbarg J., Gallegos-Jeffrey A.K., Rosenberg S.D., Wartella E., Smyser J. Content themes and influential voices within vaccine opposition on Twitter, 2019. Am J Public Health. 2020;110(S3):S326–S330. - PMC - PubMed

Substances