Department of Health Sciences, Furman University, Greenville, SC 29613, USA.
Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 May 26;18(11):5693. doi: 10.3390/ijerph18115693.
Our study aimed to describe themes of tweets related to COVID-19 vaccines, race, and ethnicity to explore the context of the intersection of these topics on Twitter.
We utilized Twitter's Streaming Application Programming Interface (API) to collect a random 1% sample of publicly available tweets from October 2020 to January 2021. The study team conducted a qualitative content analysis from the full data set of 1110 tweets.
The tweets revealed vaccine support through vaccine affirmation, advocacy through reproach, a need for a vaccine, COVID-19 and racism, vaccine development and efficacy, racist vaccine humor, and news updates. Vaccine opposition was demonstrated through direct opposition, vaccine hesitancy, and adverse reactions. Conspiracy and misinformation included scientific misinformation, political misinformation, beliefs about immunity and protective behaviors, and race extermination conspiracy. Equity and access focused on overcoming history of medical racism, pointing out health disparities, and facilitators to vaccine access. Representation touted pride in development and role models, and politics discussed the role of politics in vaccines and international politics.
Our analysis demonstrates that Twitter can provide nuances about multiple viewpoints on the vaccine related to race and ethnicity and can be beneficial in contributing to insights for public health messaging.
本研究旨在描述与 COVID-19 疫苗、种族和民族相关的推文主题，以探讨这些主题在 Twitter 上相互交织的背景。
我们利用 Twitter 的流媒体应用程序编程接口 (API) 从 2020 年 10 月至 2021 年 1 月期间随机抽取了 1%的公开可用推文作为样本。研究团队对 1110 条推文的全部数据集进行了定性内容分析。
这些推文揭示了通过疫苗肯定来表达对疫苗的支持，通过指责来倡导疫苗接种，对疫苗的需求，COVID-19 和种族主义，疫苗的开发和功效，带有种族主义色彩的疫苗幽默，以及新闻更新。疫苗的反对意见则通过直接反对、疫苗犹豫和不良反应表现出来。阴谋论和错误信息包括科学错误信息、政治错误信息、关于免疫和保护行为的信念，以及种族灭绝阴谋。公平和获取则侧重于克服医学种族主义的历史，指出健康差距，并为疫苗接种提供便利。代表性则强调了对疫苗开发和榜样的自豪，而政治则讨论了政治在疫苗和国际政治中的作用。
我们的分析表明，Twitter 可以提供与种族和民族有关的疫苗的多个观点的细微差别，并有助于为公共卫生信息提供见解。
