During the COVID-19 pandemic, although the inoculation of large populations is increasingly important, antivaccine narratives are spreading rapidly, endangering public health, human lives, and the social order. A variety of factors contribute to vaccine hesitancy, including safety concerns, religious reasons, personal beliefs, philosophical reasons, and desire for additional education. It has been observed that greater hesitancy, both general and specific to the influenza vaccine, is associated with lower vaccine uptake. A common example is the annual seasonal influenza vaccine. Vaccine hesitancy has emerged as a factor in vaccine delay and refusal for adults.
The term “vaccine hesitancy” refers to delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccine services. These fatalities are not only caused by objective reasons, such as lack of access to vaccines due to poverty, but also by the unwillingness and fear regarding vaccines from the parents of these children. Although vaccination is an effective way to prevent diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, influenza, and measles, almost 1 in 5 children still do not receive routine lifesaving immunizations, and an estimated 1.5 million children still die each year of diseases that could be prevented by vaccines that already exist. The opponents to the vaccine were vocal and could be found in all segments of society: religious communities protested the unnaturalness of using animal infection in humans, parents were concerned about the invasiveness of the procedure, and vaccinated people were often illustrated with a cow’s head growing from their neck. The opposition to vaccination dates back to the 1800s, immediately after the English physician Edward Jenner created the first vaccine in human history. Because data access is the first obstacle to attain this goal, we published a data set that can be used in studying antivaccine misinformation on social media and enable a better understanding of vaccine hesitancy. For these reasons, understanding vaccine hesitancy through the lens of social media is of paramount importance. The vaccine hesitancy is fueled by misinformation originating from websites with already questionable credibility.Ĭonclusions: The vaccine-related misinformation on social media may exacerbate the levels of vaccine hesitancy, hampering progress toward vaccine-induced herd immunity, and could potentially increase the number of infections related to new COVID-19 variants. The accounts engaged in the antivaccination narratives lean to the right (conservative) direction of the political spectrum. Results: We gathered two curated Twitter data collections and made them publicly available: (1) a streaming keyword–centered data collection with more than 1.8 million tweets, and (2) a historical account–level data collection with more than 135 million tweets. The political leaning of the accounts was estimated by measuring the political bias of the media outlets they shared. Then, we collected the historical tweets of the set of accounts that engaged in spreading antivaccination narratives between October 2020 and December 2020, leveraging the Academic Track Twitter API.
Methods: We started the ongoing data collection on October 18, 2020, leveraging the Twitter streaming application programming interface (API) to follow a set of specific antivaccine-related keywords. We characterize the collected accounts in terms of prominent hashtags, shared news sources, and most likely political leaning. The data set is made available to the research community via our AvaxTweets data set GitHub repository. Objective: In this paper, we describe a data set of Twitter posts and Twitter accounts that publicly exhibit a strong antivaccine stance. To properly understand the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy through the lens of social media, it is of great importance to gather the relevant data. Antivaccine activists have also begun to use platforms such as Twitter to promote their views. Misinformation originating from various sources has been spreading on the web since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. JMIR Bioinformatics and Biotechnology 23 articlesīackground: False claims about COVID-19 vaccines can undermine public trust in ongoing vaccination campaigns, posing a threat to global public health.JMIR Biomedical Engineering 61 articles.JMIR Perioperative Medicine 69 articles.Journal of Participatory Medicine 71 articles.JMIR Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies 177 articles.JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting 230 articles.Interactive Journal of Medical Research 259 articles.JMIR Public Health and Surveillance 964 articles.Journal of Medical Internet Research 6898 articles.
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