Examining the Prevailing Negative Sentiments Related to COVID-19 Vaccination: Unsupervised Deep Learning of Twitter Posts over a 16 Month Period

Abstract

Despite the demonstrated efficacy, safety, and availability of COVID-19 vaccines, efforts in global mass vaccination have been met with widespread scepticism and vaccine hesitancy or refusal. Understanding the reasons for the public’s negative opinions towards COVID-19 vaccination using Twitter may help make new headways in improving vaccine uptake. This study, therefore, examined the prevailing negative sentiments towards COVID-19 vaccination via the analysis of public twitter posts over a 16 month period. Original tweets (in English) from 1 April 2021 to 1 August 2022 were extracted. A bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT)-based model was applied, and only negative sentiments tweets were selected. Topic modelling was used, followed by manual thematic analysis performed iteratively by the study investigators, with independent reviews of the topic labels and themes. A total of 4,448,314 tweets were analysed. The analysis generated six topics and three themes related to the prevailing negative sentiments towards COVID-19 vaccination. The themes could be broadly understood as either emotional reactions to perceived invidious policies or safety and effectiveness concerns related to the COVID-19 vaccines. The themes uncovered in the present infodemiology study fit well into the increasing vaccination model, and they highlight important public conversations to be had and potential avenues for future policy intervention and campaign efforts.