Associations between major news announcements related to vaccines and attitudes towards vaccines have been studied online (specifically on Twitter) by researchers from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.
They thus discovered that every major announcement related to the vaccine launch was associated with a large decrease in negative sentiment on the same day, going from around 40% to 20% of all daily tweets.
Almost two million tweets analyzed
Several COVID-19 vaccines have been approved globally and large-scale vaccination is currently underway, but attitudes towards vaccination and, in particular, what has been termed vaccine vacillation, pose a potential threat to community coverage and immunity.
The study analyzed nearly 2 million tweets from 522,893 people in the United Kingdom of the United Kingdom between November 2020 and January 2021, a period that coincided with the news about the major vaccine trials that were announced or published, and the UK Medical and Health Regulations Authority (MHRA) approvals.
The proven effect of diminishing negativity, however, was short-lived: the proportion of negative tweets returned to the background average within a few days. They also saw a similar decrease in negative sentiment when Pfizer / BioNTech announced the results of the phase III vaccine trial.
As explained Seena fazel, from the Oxford Department of Psychiatry, who led the research:
Vaccine hesitancy is not a new phenomenon, but social media has exponentially increased the ability for rumors, half-truths and fallacies to spread globally in seconds. This research was informative because it showed that providing clear and positive messages around new research actually combats this negative tide, but that the positive trend lasts for a limited period of time. This useful information can help policymakers and health communicators develop more effective campaigns to promote vaccine adoption, such as spacing out news announcements and writing content specifically targeted at the audiences of social networks.
Part of the problem is amplified in social networks, through misinformation and hoaxes, but the origin of the distortion is in the media themselves, which apply anecdotes against data and They look for the scandal to attract the audience, as you can see in the following video: