Background To control the COVID-19 pandemic high vaccine acceptability and uptake will be needed. Teachers represent a priority population to minimize social disruption and ensure continuity in education, which is vital for the well-being and healthy development of youth during the pandemic. The objective of this analysis was to measure public school teachers’ intentions to receive a COVID-19 vaccine in British Columbia (BC), Canada. Methods A population-wide cross-sectional online survey from August to November 2020 asked all BC public school teachers with an available email address how likely they were to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. Two multivariable logistic regression models explored separately sociodemographic and vaccine hesitancy predictors for intention to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. Results A total of 5,076 teachers participated. The majority, 89.6%, reported they were likely or very likely to accept a COVID-19 vaccine. In multivariable regression, sociodemographic predictors of intention to be vaccinated included being male, having an educational background in science or engineering, and using reliable information sources on vaccination such as public health and health care providers. Teachers who reported lower levels of vaccine hesitancy, higher general vaccine knowledge, and belief that COVID-19 was a serious illness were more likely to intend to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. Conclusion A high proportion of public-school teachers in BC intend to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. Continued monitoring of vaccine intentions will be important to inform public health vaccine implementation.

Background The development and approval of COVID-19 vaccines have generated optimism for the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and a return to normalcy. However, vaccine hesitancy, often fueled by misinformation, poses a major barrier to achieving herd immunity. Objective We aim to investigate Twitter users’ attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination in Canada after vaccine rollout. Methods We applied a weakly supervised aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) technique, which involves the human-in-the-loop system, on COVID-19 vaccination–related tweets in Canada. Automatically generated aspect and opinion terms were manually corrected by public health experts to ensure the accuracy of the terms and make them more domain-specific. Then, based on these manually corrected terms, the system inferred sentiments toward the aspects. We observed sentiments toward key aspects related to COVID-19 vaccination, and investigated how sentiments toward “vaccination” changed over time. In addition, we analyzed the most retweeted or liked tweets by observing most frequent nouns and sentiments toward key aspects. Results After applying the ABSA system, we obtained 170 aspect terms (eg, “immunity” and “pfizer”) and 6775 opinion terms (eg, “trustworthy” for the positive sentiment and “jeopardize” for the negative sentiment). While manually verifying or editing these terms, our public health experts selected 20 key aspects related to COVID-19 vaccination for analysis. The sentiment analysis results for the 20 key aspects revealed negative sentiments related to “vaccine distribution,” “side effects,” “allergy,” “reactions,” and “anti-vaxxer,” and positive sentiments related to “vaccine campaign,” “vaccine candidates,” and “immune response.” These results indicate that the Twitter users express concerns about the safety of vaccines but still consider vaccines as the option to end the pandemic. In addition, compared to the sentiment of the remaining tweets, the most retweeted or liked tweets showed more positive sentiment overall toward key aspects (P<.001), especially vaccines (P<.001) and vaccination (P=.009). Further investigation of the most retweeted or liked tweets revealed two opposing trends in Twitter users who showed negative sentiments toward vaccines: the “anti-vaxxer” population that used negative sentiments as a means to discourage vaccination and the “Covid Zero” population that used negative sentiments to encourage vaccinations while critiquing the public health response. Conclusions Our study examined public sentiments toward COVID-19 vaccination on tweets over an extended period in Canada. Our findings could inform public health agencies to design and implement interventions to promote vaccination.

Objectives Teachers are an important occupational group to consider when addressing vaccine confidence and uptake for school-aged children due to their proximate role within school-based immunization programs. The objectives of this study were to characterize and identify sociodemographic factors associated with vaccine confidence and describe teachers’ knowledge of and perceived role in the school-based immunization program, with the aim of informing public health policy and identifying opportunities for supporting teachers in their role in school-based immunization programs. Methods A cross-sectional survey of elementary and secondary public-school teachers in British Columbia was completed from August to November 2020. Respondents provided sociodemographic information, as well as past vaccination experience, vaccine knowledge, and perceived role in the school-based immunization program. Vaccine confidence was measured using the Vaccine Hesitancy Scale (VHS). Characteristics associated with the VHS sub-scales ‘lack of confidence in vaccines’ and ‘perceived risk of vaccines’, were explored using ANOVA. Descriptive analysis was completed for teachers’ perceived role in the immunization program. Results 5,095 surveys were included in this analysis. Overall vaccine confidence was high, with vaccine hesitancy being related to the perceived risk of vaccines rather than a lack of confidence in the effectiveness of vaccines. ANOVA found significant differences for both VHS-sub-scales based on sociodemographic factors, however, the strength of the association was generally small. High general vaccine knowledge and never having delayed or refused a vaccine in the past were associated with higher vaccine confidence. Overall, teachers reported a lack of clarity in their role within the school-based immunization program. Conclusions This large population-based observational study of teachers highlights a number of key engagement opportunities between public health and the education sector. Using a validated scale, we found that overall, teachers are highly accepting of vaccines, and well situated as potential partners with public health to address vaccine hesitancy.

BACKGROUND The development and approval of COVID-19 vaccines have generated optimism for the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and a return to normalcy. However, vaccine hesitancy, often fueled by misinformation poses a major barrier to achieving herd immunity. OBJECTIVE We aim to investigate Twitter users’ attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination in Canada after vaccine rollout. METHODS We applied a weakly-supervised aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) technique on COVID-19 vaccination-related tweets in Canada. Automatically-generated aspect and opinion terms were manually corrected by public health experts to ensure the accuracy of the terms and make them more domain-specific. Then, based on these manually corrected terms, the system inferred sentiments toward the aspects. We observed sentiments toward key aspects related to COVID-19 vaccination, and investigated how sentiment toward “vaccination” changed over time. In addition, we analyzed the most retweeted/liked tweets by observing most frequent nouns and sentiments toward key aspects. RESULTS After training tweets using an ABSA system, we obtained 108 aspect terms (e.g., “immunity” and “pfizer”) and 6,793 opinion terms (e.g., “trustworthy” for the positive sentiment and “jeopardize” for the negative sentiment). While manually verifying/editing these terms, our public health experts selected 20 key aspects related to COVID-19 vaccination for more analysis. The results showed that the top-ranked automatically-extracted aspects include “risk”, “delay”, and “hope”. The sentiment analysis results for the 20 key aspects revealed negative sentiments related to “vaccine distribution”, “side effects”, “allergy”, “reactions” and “anti-vaxxer”, and positive sentiments related to “vaccine campaign”, “vaccine candidates”, and “immune response”. All these results indicate that the Twitter users express concerns about the safety of vaccines, but still consider vaccines as the option to end the pandemic. In addition, compared to the sentiment of all the tweets, the most retweeted/liked tweets showed more positive sentiment overall, especially about vaccination itself. When looking more closely, the most retweeted/liked tweets showed an interesting dichotomy in Twitter users, i.e., the “anti-vaxxer” population who used a negative sentiment as a means to discourage vaccination and the “Covid Zero” population who used negative sentiments to encourage vaccinations while critiquing the public health response. CONCLUSIONS This study is the first to examine public sentiments toward COVID-19 vaccination on tweets over an extended period of time in Canada. Our findings could inform public health agencies to design and implement interventions to promote vaccination, and get closer to the goal of ending the pandemic.