Vaccine rhetoric on social media and COVID-19 vaccine uptake rates: A triangulation using self-reported vaccine acceptance.

ABSTRACT: The primary goal of this study is to examine the association between vaccine rhetoric on Twitter and the public's uptake rates of COVID-19 vaccines in the United States, compared to the extent of an association between self-reported vaccine acceptance and the CDC's uptake rates. We downloaded vaccine-related posts on Twitter in real-time daily for 13 months, from October 2021 to September 2022, collecting over half a billion tweets. A previously validated deep-learning algorithm was then applied to (1) filter out irrelevant tweets and (2) group the remaining relevant tweets into pro-, anti-, and neutral vaccine sentiments. Our results indicate that the tweet counts (combining all three sentiments) were significantly correlated with the uptake rates of all stages of COVID-19 shots (p < 0.01

SUBMITTER: Nelson V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11077824 | biostudies-literature | 2024 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature