The Impact of Public Health Events on COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy on Chinese Social Media: National Infoveillance Study

作者：Zizheng Zhang, Guanrui Feng, Jiahong Xu, Yimin Zhang, Jinhui Li, Jian Huang, Babatunde Akinwunmi, Casper J. P. Zhang, Wai‐Kit Ming · 发表于：JMIR Public Health and Surveillance · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.2196/32936 · 被引用次数：34 · 研究领域：Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy、Misinformation and Its Impacts、COVID-19 epidemiological studies

BACKGROUND: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges to every country worldwide. A call for global vaccination for COVID-19 plays a pivotal role in the fight against this virus. With the development of COVID-19 vaccines, public willingness to get vaccinated has become an important public health concern, considering the vaccine hesitancy observed worldwide. Social media is powerful in monitoring public attitudes and assess the dissemination, which would provide valuable information for policy makers. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to investigate the responses of vaccine positivity on social media when major public events (major outbreaks) or major adverse events related to vaccination (COVID-19 or other similar vaccines) were reported. METHODS: A total of 340,783 vaccine-related posts were captured with the poster's information on Weibo, the largest social platform in China. After data cleaning, 156,223 posts were included in the subsequent analysis. Using pandas and SnowNLP Python libraries, posts were classified into 2 categories, positive and negative. After model training and sentiment analysis, the proportion of positive posts was computed to measure the public positivity toward the COVID-19 vaccine. RESULTS: The positivity toward COVID-19 vaccines in China tends to fluctuate over time in the range of 45.7% to 77.0% and is intuitively correlated with public health events. In terms of gender, males were more positive (70.0% of the time) than females....