Using COVID-19 Vaccine Attitudes on Twitter to Improve Vaccine Uptake Forecast Models in the United States: Infodemiology Study of Tweets

Abstract

Background Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a global effort to develop vaccines that protect against COVID-19. Individuals who are fully vaccinated are far less likely to contract and therefore transmit the virus to others. Researchers have found that the internet and social media both play a role in shaping personal choices about vaccinations. Objective This study aims to determine whether supplementing COVID-19 vaccine uptake forecast models with the attitudes found in tweets improves over baseline models that only use historical vaccination data. Methods Daily COVID-19 vaccination data at the county level was collected for the January 2021 to May 2021 study period. Twitter’s streaming application programming interface was used to collect COVID-19 vaccine tweets during this same period. Several autoregressive integrated moving average models were executed to predict the vaccine uptake rate using only historical data (baseline autoregressive integrated moving average) and individual Twitter-derived features (autoregressive integrated moving average exogenous variable model). Results In this study, we found that supplementing baseline forecast models with both historical vaccination data and COVID-19 vaccine attitudes found in tweets reduced root mean square error by as much as 83%. Conclusions Developing a predictive tool for vaccination uptake in the United States will empower public health researchers and decisionmakers to design targeted vaccination campaigns in hopes of achieving the vaccination threshold required for the United States to reach widespread population protection.