Public attitudes on social media toward vaccination before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

With the success of COVID-19 vaccines in clinical trials, vaccination programs are being administered for the population with the hopes of herd immunity. However, the success of any vaccination program depends on the percentage of people willing to get vaccination which is influenced by social, economic, demographic, and vaccine-specific factors. Thus, it is important to understand public attitudes and perceptions toward vaccination. This study aims to measure public attitude toward vaccines and vaccinations before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, using public data from Twitter. A total of 880,586 tweets for 57,529 unique users were included in the study. Most of the tweets were posted in five languages: French, English, Swedish, Dutch, and Italian. These tweets were divided into two time periods: before COVID-19 (T1) and during COVID-19 (T2). This study observed the shift in the sentiments of the public attitude toward vaccines before and during COVID-19 pandemic. Both positive and negative shifts in sentiments were observed for the users of various languages but shifts toward positive sentiments were more prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic.