Positive attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines: A cross-country analysis

Abstract

COVID-19 severely impacted world health and, as a consequence of the measures implemented to stop the spread of the virus, also irreversibly damaged the world economy. Research shows that receiving the COVID-19 vaccine is the most successful measure to combat the virus and could also address its indirect consequences. However, vaccine hesitancy is growing worldwide and the WHO names this hesitancy as one of the top ten threats to global health. This study investigates the trend in positive attitudes towards vaccines across ten countries since a positive attitude is important. Furthermore, we investigate those variables related to having a positive attitude, as these factors could potentially increase the uptake of vaccines. We derive our text corpus from vaccine-related tweets, harvested in real-time from Twitter. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP), we derive the sentiment and emotions contained in the tweets to construct daily time-series data. We analyse a panel dataset spanning both the Northern and Southern hemispheres from 1 February 2021 to 31 July 2021. To determine the relationship between several variables and the positive sentiment (attitude) towards vaccines, we run various models, including POLS, Panel Fixed Effects and Instrumental Variables estimations. Our results show that more information about vaccines’ safety and the expected side effects are needed to increase positive attitudes towards vaccines. Additionally, government procurement and the vaccine rollout should improve. Accessibility to the vaccine should be a priority, and a collective effort should be made to increase positive messaging about the vaccine, especially on social media. The results of this study contribute to the understanding of the emotional challenges associated with vaccine uptake and inform policymakers, health workers, and stakeholders who communicate to the public during infectious disease outbreaks. Additionally, the global fight against COVID-19 might be lost if the attitude towards vaccines is not improved.

Global spatiotemporal trends and determinants of COVID-19 vaccine acceptance on Twitter: a multilingual deep learning study in 135 countries and territories

“…29 The declining support from the public posed a global challenge for policymakers to rely on vaccination to end the pandemic. 28,30 The government should prepare early to maintain public support for vaccination.…”

How the Italian Twitter Conversation on Vaccines Changed During the First Phase of the Pandemic: A Mixed-Method Analysis

“…Several studies explored the characteristics of the vaccine discourse on social media during the pandemic ( 18 – 21 ), though only few studies ( 22 ) investigated the impact of the pandemic on the vaccine-related discourse, comparing its characteristics before and during COVID-19. Our objective was to understand how the Italian conversation about vaccines on Twitter changed during the first phase of the pandemic, in terms of vaccine stance, involved actors and dominant narratives, compared to the months immediately preceding the pandemic.…”

Changes in Attitudes toward COVID-19 Vaccination and Vaccine Uptake during Pandemic

“…In the large international study, authors investigated variables related to having a positive attitude as factors that could potentially increase the uptake of vaccines. They found that the following variables could improve people’s attitudes towards vaccines: better information about the COVID-19 vaccines in general, and especially information related to the safety and side effects of vaccines; increased trust in governments in conducting the vaccine rollout; and handling procurement and capacity issues [ 43 ].…”