Covid Vaccine Sentiment

Sep 02, 2021

Vaccination is a cornerstone of the prevention of communicable infectious diseases; however, vaccines have traditionally met with public fear and hesitancy, and COVID-19 vaccines are no exception. Social media use has been demonstrated to play a role in the low acceptance of vaccines. The following sentiments are analyzed from 11th of March, 2020 to present day tweets.

There are 37.4 % neutral, 49.6 % positive and 13.0 % negative tweets.

Positive sentiment about the COVID-19 vaccine was the dominant polarity on Twitter. Nearly two-thirds of the sentiments of all tweets expressed a positive public opinion about the COVID-19 vaccine; around one-third were negative. Among the 8 basic emotions, trust and anticipation were the two prominent positive emotions observed in the tweets, while fear was the top negative emotion.

Positive Sentiments

Positive sentiment about the COVID-19 vaccine was the dominant polarity on Twitter. Nearly two-thirds of the sentiments of all tweets expressed a positive public opinion about the COVID-19 vaccine. Among the 8 basic emotions, safe and effective were the two prominent positive emotions observed in the tweets

There are 16701 negative sentiment words in the combination of all cells in column Cleaned_tweets.

Negative Sentiments

Around one-third were negative. Among the 8 basic emotions, misinformation, death, bad and hell were the top negative emotions.

Conclusions:

Public COVID-19 vaccine–related discussion on Twitter was largely driven by major events about COVID-19 vaccines and mirrored the active news topics in mainstream media. The discussion also demonstrated a global perspective. The increasingly positive sentiment around COVID-19 vaccines and the dominant emotion of trust shown in the social media discussion may imply higher acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines compared with previous vaccines.