Negative vaccine voices in Swedish social media

Vaccinations are one of the most significant interventions to public health, but vaccine hesitancy creates concerns for a portion of the population in many countries, including Sweden. Since discussions on vaccine hesitancy are often taken on social networking sites, data from Swedish social media are used to study and quantify the sentiment among the discussants on the vaccination-or-not topic during phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Out of all the posts analyzed a majority showed a stronger negative sentiment, prevailing throughout the whole of the examined period, with some spikes or jumps due to the occurrence of certain vaccine-related events distinguishable in the results. Sentiment analysis can be a valuable tool to track public opinions regarding the use, efficacy, safety, and importance of vaccination

Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy : A mixed methods investigation of matters of life and death

In this article, hesitancy towards COVID-19 vaccinations is investigated as a phenomenon touching upon existential questions. We argue that it encompasses ideas of illness and health, and also of dying and fear of suffering. Building on a specific strand within anti-vaccination studies, we conjecture that vaccine hesitancy is, to some extent, reasonable, and that this scepticism should be studied with compassion. Through a mixed methods approach, vaccine hesitancy, as it is being expressed in a Swedish digital open forum, is investigated and understood as, on the one hand, a perceived need of protecting one’s body from techno-scientific experiments, and thus the risk of becoming a victim of medicine itself. On the other hand, the community members express what we call a tacit belief in modern medicine by demonstrating their own “expert” pandemic knowledge. The analysis also shows how the COVID-19 pandemic triggers memories of another pandemic, namely the swine flu in 2009–2010, and what we term a medical crisis that occurred then, due to a vaccine that caused a rare but severe side effect in Sweden and elsewhere

The Prevalence of mRNA Related Discussions During the Post-COVID-19 Era

Vaccinations are one of the most significant interventions to public health, but vaccine hesitancy and skepticism are raising serious concerns for a portion of the population in many countries, including Sweden. In this study, we use Swedish social media data and structural topic modeling to automatically identify mRNA-vaccine related discussion themes and gain deeper insights into how people\u27s refusal or acceptance of the mRNA technology affects vaccine uptake. Our point of departure is a scientific study published in February 2022, which seems to once again sparked further suspicion and concern and highlight the necessity to focus on issues about the nature and trustworthiness in vaccine safety. Structural topic modelling is a statistical method that facilitates the study of topic prevalence, temporal topic evolution, and topic correlation automatically. Using such a method, our research goal is to identify the current understanding of the mechanisms on how the public perceives the mRNA vaccine in the light of new experimental findings