Examining Vaccine Sentiment on Twitter and Local Vaccine Deployment during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Lourdes S. Martinez (), Matthew W. Savage, Elisabeth Jones, Elizabeth Mikita, Varun Yadav and Ming-Hsiang Tsou
Additional contact information
Lourdes S. Martinez: School of Communication, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA
Matthew W. Savage: School of Communication, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA
Elisabeth Jones: College of Arts and Letters, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA
Elizabeth Mikita: School of Public Health, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA
Varun Yadav: Department of Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego, CA 92093, USA
Ming-Hsiang Tsou: Department of Geography, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 20, issue 1, 1-15

Abstract: Understanding local public attitudes toward receiving vaccines is vital to successful vaccine campaigns. Social media platforms may help uncover vaccine sentiments during infectious disease outbreaks at the local level, and whether offline local events support vaccine-promotion efforts. Communication Infrastructure Theory (CIT) served as a guiding framework for this case study of the San Diego region examining local public sentiment toward vaccines expressed on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic. We performed a sentiment analysis (including positivity and subjectivity) of 187,349 tweets gathered from May 2020 to March 2021, and examined how sentiment corresponded with local vaccine deployment. The months of November and December (52.9%) 2020 saw a majority of tweets expressing positive sentiment and coincided with announcements of offline local events signaling San Diego’s imminent deployment of COVID-19 vaccines. Across all months, tweets remained mostly objective (never falling below 63%). In terms of CIT, considering multiple levels of the Story Telling Network in online spaces, and examining sentiment about vaccines on Twitter may help scholars to explore the Communication Action Context, as well as cultivate positive community attitudes to improve the Field of Health Action regarding vaccines. Real-time analysis of local tweets during development and deployment of new vaccines may help monitor local public responses and guide promotion of immunizations in communities.

Keywords: vaccines; Twitter; Communication Infrastructure Theory; sentiment; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/1/354/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/1/354/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:20:y:2022:i:1:p:354-:d:1015192

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().