Toward Using Twitter Data to Monitor Covid-19 Vaccine Safety in Pregnancy

Abstract

Background: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) during pregnancy is associated with an increased risk of maternal death, intensive care unit (ICU) admission, and preterm birth; however, many people who are pregnant refuse to receive Covid-19 vaccination because of a lack of safety data. Objective: The objective of this preliminary study was to assess whether we could identify (1) users who have reported on Twitter that they received Covid-19 vaccination during pregnancy or the periconception period, and (2) reports of their pregnancy outcomes. Methods: We searched for reports of Covid-19 vaccination in a large collection of tweets posted by users who have announced their pregnancy on Twitter. To help determine if users were vaccinated during pregnancy, we drew upon a natural language processing (NLP) tool that estimates the timeframe of the prenatal period. For users who posted tweets with a timestamp indicating they were vaccinated during pregnancy, we drew upon additional NLP tools to help identify tweets that report their pregnancy outcomes. Results: Upon manually verifying the content of tweets detected automatically, we identified 150 users who reported on Twitter that they received at least one dose of Covid-19 vaccination during pregnancy or the periconception period. Among the 60 completed pregnancies, we manually verified at least one reported outcome for 45 (75%) of them. Conclusions: Given the limited availability of data on Covid-19 vaccine safety in pregnancy, Twitter can be a complementary resource for potentially increasing the acceptance of Covid-19 vaccination in pregnant populations. Directions for future work include developing machine learning algorithms to detect a larger number of users for observational studies.

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“…AEs include local and systemic grade 3 reactions, anaphylaxis, and vaccine-induced myocarditis (relevant for those ages 18-39 years only); risks were estimated based on Moderna clinical trial data and published sources. [45][46][47] The unit cost of myocarditis following COVID-19 infection was assumed to apply to the vaccine-induced myocarditis AE. 48 All other AE costs were derived from Teng (2022), with the assumptions that 20% of grade 3 systemic AEs would require an outpatient visit, and that 60% of anaphylaxis cases would require hospitalization (and the remaining 40% would require emergency room care).…”