Sentiments and Emotions for Vaccination in 2021: An International Comparison Study

Abstract

AbstractComprehending how individuals feel when they discuss the vaccine is important for the immunization campaign and outbreak management during a health emergency. Online conversations provide useful information for assessing sentimental and emotional reactions to the evolutions of the pandemic and immunization program. In this study, we employ a corpus of around 58 million English tweets from users in 17 countries that discuss vaccine-related topics in the year 2021. We apply Soft Dynamic Time Warping algorithm and Time Lag Cross-Correlation approach and find that the evolutions of sentiments closely mirror the pandemic statistics. We also examine five topics connected to vaccination and discover that trust is the most predominate feeling, followed by fear, anger, and joy. Some countries reported higher emotional scores on a theme than others (people in Cuba and the United States exhibit higher levels of trust, Pakistanis and Indians express higher levels of joy, Australians and Chinese express higher levels of fear, and Japanese and British people express higher levels of anger). This study report offers a viewpoint on the public’s response to the epidemic and vaccination and aids policy-makers with preventive strategies for a future crisis.