Department of Health Policy and Organization, School of Public Health, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294, USA.
Center of Population Sciences for Health Equity, College of Nursing, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA.
Vaccine. 2022 Nov 15;40(48):6895-6899. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2022.10.037. Epub 2022 Oct 21.
Addressing negative vaccine sentiments is paramount to COVID-19 prevention efforts. However, assessing population sentiments is challenging due to the desirability bias that can emerge when directly asking respondents for their opinions on vaccination. Social media data, containing people's unfiltered thoughts, have the potential to offer valuable insights that could guide vaccine promotion messaging. We extracted one week's (4/5-4/11, 2020) worth of COVID-19 vaccine posts on Twitter (tweets) from the U.S. (N = 208,973) and segmented tweets with negative sentiments toward COVID-19 vaccines (n = 14,794). We imputed location based on Twitter users' self-reported state of residence. We found that states in the South had significantly higher prevalence of negative tweets compared to states in other parts of the country, and higher-income states reported lower prevalence of negative tweets. Our findings suggest the existence of negative vaccine sentiments and geographic variability in these opinions, warranting tailored vaccine promotion efforts, particularly for the southern U.S.
解决负面疫苗情绪对于 COVID-19 预防工作至关重要。然而，由于在直接询问受访者对疫苗接种的看法时可能出现的期望偏差，评估人群情绪具有挑战性。社交媒体数据包含人们未经过滤的想法，有可能提供有价值的见解，从而指导疫苗推广信息。我们从美国提取了一周（2020 年 4 月 5 日至 4 月 11 日）的 Twitter 上的 COVID-19 疫苗帖子（推文）（N=208973），并对带有 COVID-19 疫苗负面情绪的推文进行了细分（n=14794）。我们根据 Twitter 用户自我报告的居住州来推断位置。我们发现，与其他地区相比，南部各州的负面推文比例明显更高，而收入较高的州则报告负面推文比例较低。我们的研究结果表明存在负面疫苗情绪以及这些观点的地理差异，这需要有针对性的疫苗推广工作，特别是在美国南部。
