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

Research output: Journal Publications and ReviewsRGC 21 - Publication in refereed journalpeer-review

19 Scopus Citations
View graph of relations

Author(s)

  • Zizheng Zhang
  • Guanrui Feng
  • Jiahong Xu
  • Yimin Zhang
  • Jinhui Li
  • Jian Huang
  • Babatunde Akinwunmi
  • Casper J P Zhang

Detail(s)

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere32936
Journal / PublicationJMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Volume7
Issue number11
Online published9 Nov 2021
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2021

Link(s)

Abstract

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. In terms of region, when regional epidemics arose, not only the region with the epidemic and surrounding regions but also the whole country showed more positive attitudes to varying degrees. When the epidemic subsided temporarily, positivity decreased with varying degrees in each region.
Conclusions: In China, public positivity toward COVID-19 vaccines fluctuates over time and a regional epidemic or news on social media may cause significant variations in willingness to accept a vaccine. Furthermore, public attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination vary from gender and region. It is crucial for policy makers to adjust their policies through the use of positive incentives with prompt responses to pandemic-related news to promote vaccination acceptance.

Research Area(s)

  • Attitude, China, COVID-19, Data mining, Hesitancy, Infoveillance, Public health, Sentiment, Sentiment analysis, Social media, Surveillance, Vaccine, Weibo

Citation Format(s)

The Impact of Public Health Events on COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy on Chinese Social Media: National Infoveillance Study. / Zhang, Zizheng; Feng, Guanrui; Xu, Jiahong et al.
In: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, Vol. 7, No. 11, e32936, 11.2021.

Research output: Journal Publications and ReviewsRGC 21 - Publication in refereed journalpeer-review

Download Statistics

No data available