HPV vaccine narratives on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic: a social network, thematic, and sentiment analysis

Abstract

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has increased online interactions and the spread of misinformation. Some researchers anticipate benefits stemming from improved public awareness of the value of vaccines while others worry concerns around vaccine development and public health mandates may have damaged public trust. There is a need to understand whether the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine development, and vaccine mandates have influenced HPV vaccine attitudes and sentiments to inform health communication strategies. Methods We collected 596,987 global English-language tweets from January 2019-May 2021 using Twitter’s Academic Research Product track. We determined vaccine confident and hesitant networks discussing HPV immunization using social network analysis. Then, we used a neural network approach to natural language processing to measure narratives and sentiment pertaining to HPV immunization. Results Most of the tweets in the vaccine hesitant network were negative in tone (54.9%) and focused on safety concerns surrounding the HPV vaccine while most of the tweets in the vaccine confident network were neutral (51.6%) and emphasized the health benefits of vaccination. Growth in negative sentiment among the vaccine hesitant network corresponded with legislative efforts in the State of New York to mandate HPV vaccination for public school students in 2019 and the WHO declaration of COVID-19 as a Global Health Emergency in 2020. In the vaccine confident network, the number of tweets concerning the HPV vaccine decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic but in both vaccine hesitant and confident networks, the sentiments, and themes of tweets about HPV vaccine were unchanged. Conclusions Although we did not observe a difference in narratives or sentiments surrounding the HPV vaccine during the COVID-19 pandemic, we observed a decreased focus on the HPV vaccine among vaccine confident groups. As routine vaccine catch-up programs restart, there is a need to invest in health communication online to raise awareness about the benefits and safety of the HPV vaccine.

Detecting and monitoring concerns against HPV vaccination on social media using large language models

“…In the past, topical analyses coupled with human supervision were used for collating reasons behind vaccine hesitancy 27 , 28 . The proposed pipeline revealed vaccine safety, vaccine effectiveness, and mistrust due to vaccine mandates as major concerns in pre 2020 tweets; this is aligned with prior findings examining social media posts from a similar time frame 16 . Increasing negative anecdotal reports influence parents’ decision to vaccinate their children 7 .…”

“…WHO built a social listening platform, EARS to track emerging concerns related to COVID-19 from social media posts using a semi-supervised machine learning technique 15 . Sentiment 16 and stances 17 against HPV vaccination on social media platforms, including Twitter and Reddit 18 are monitored to estimate people’s opinions. Topical analyses and the diffusion of HPV-related content on social media can reveal underlying concerns and prevent the cascading effect of misinformation 19 , 20 .…”

The Role of Scientific Research in Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Discussions on Twitter: Social Network Analysis

“…Given the unique period of data collection (ie, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic), which influenced the quantity of discussion about non-COVID-19 topics, the generalizability of these findings is reduced. Our experience in collecting these data over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic has been explored further in another publication, where we examined the attitudes and sentiment on Twitter toward HPV vaccination amidst the context of the pandemic [107].…”

Human Papillomavirus Vaccination Acceleration and Introduction in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Multi-Country Cohort Analysis

“…Also, due to the COVID-19 lockdown, access to eligible girls dropped and has not returned to the pre-pandemic level [16][17][18]. Similarly, in countries where the HPV vaccination program was to be introduced, misinformation associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, including the COVID-19 vaccine, has hindered such efforts [19][20][21][22], while in others, where it has been introduced, the earlier gains have been eroded [23][24][25][26].…”