Detecting adherence to the recommended childhood vaccination schedule from user-generated content in a US parenting forum

Abstract

Vaccine hesitancy is considered as one of the leading causes for the resurgence of vaccine preventable diseases. A non-negligible minority of parents does not fully adhere to the recommended vaccination schedule, leading their children to be partially immunized and at higher risk of contracting vaccine preventable diseases. Here, we leverage more than one million comments of 201,986 users posted from March 2008 to April 2019 on the public online forum BabyCenter US to learn more about such parents. For 32% with geographic location, we find the number of mapped users for each US state resembling the census population distribution with good agreement. We employ Natural Language Processing to identify 6884 and 10,131 users expressing their intention of following the recommended and alternative vaccination schedule, respectively RSUs and ASUs. From the analysis of their activity on the forum we find that ASUs have distinctly different interests and previous experiences with vaccination than RSUs. In particular, ASUs are more likely to follow groups focused on alternative medicine, are two times more likely to have experienced adverse events following immunization, and to mention more serious adverse reactions such as seizure or developmental regression. Content analysis of comments shows that the resources most frequently shared by both groups point to governmental domains (.gov). Finally, network analysis shows that RSUs and ASUs communicate between each other (indicating the absence of echo chambers), however with the latter group being more endogamic and favoring interactions with other ASUs. While our findings are limited to the specific platform analyzed, our approach may provide additional insights for the development of campaigns targeting parents on digital platforms.

Echoes through Time: Evolution of the Italian COVID-19 Vaccination Debate

“…Compared to North America and North European countries, confidence in the safety of vaccination is especially low in Western and Eastern Europe, with 59% and 40% respectively agreeing that vaccines are safe (Wellcome Trust 2018). It has also been found that parents who deviate from recommended childhood vaccination schedules are more likely to focus on potential serious adverse reactions to vaccination (Betti et al 2021) and display lower trust in science (Wellcome Trust 2018). Vaccine hesitancy is not only related to reluctance to engage with scientific evidence (Browne et al 2015), but it has also been linked to the emphasis on religious identity (Kata 2010), alternative or holistic health methods (Kalimeri et al 2019;Betti et al 2021), and certain political attitudes (Yaqub et al 2014;Browne et al 2015).…”

“…It has also been found that parents who deviate from recommended childhood vaccination schedules are more likely to focus on potential serious adverse reactions to vaccination (Betti et al 2021) and display lower trust in science (Wellcome Trust 2018). Vaccine hesitancy is not only related to reluctance to engage with scientific evidence (Browne et al 2015), but it has also been linked to the emphasis on religious identity (Kata 2010), alternative or holistic health methods (Kalimeri et al 2019;Betti et al 2021), and certain political attitudes (Yaqub et al 2014;Browne et al 2015). However, public health communication campaigns may be producing an effect.…”

Social media as a source of drug safety information in the paediatric population

“…Lack of medicines information in children, un-licensed medicines use and di culties to develop paediatric medicines [45,48] prevents the effective and safe use of medicines. SM articles are focused in either a speci c therapeutic area or DRP such as non-compliance with vaccines schedules, found in (60%) of the posts [37] and the di culties to administer oral formulations to young children and strategies parents use to do it [20]. Most affected ages were infants (165, 26%) and children (98,15%).…”

“…Thus, the Web-RADR project shared recommendations such as to focus on niche populations and as a source to complement traditional like forums [6], to decrease irrelevant data. Paediatric focused searches for product or disease-speci c have been studied in Facebook [22][23][24][25], Pinterest [26], Twitter [27][28][29][30][31] and forums [12,20,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38]. Most authors searched for ADR mentions in SM for particular medicines [39,40] and ADR [41] but, to date, none conducted a global analysis in paediatrics.…”

LibertyMFD: A Lexicon to Assess the Moral Foundation of Liberty.

“…Words in the LibertyMFD were selected after extensive experimentation on two different data-driven lexicon generation approaches. Further, we assessed the performance of the lexicon on a manually annotated dataset of usergenerated text regarding the issue of vaccine hesitancy, one of the topics where liberty is known to be a critical factor [7].…”