Studying public perception about covaxin vaccination: A sentiment analysis of tweets

Abstract

Background: After a year of the COVID-19 pandemic began, there are approximately 200 vaccine candidates in development. Ten of them have been approved by several countries or used in limited emergency situations. India is gearing up to launch its vaccination campaign on January, 16. Vaccination attitudes can significantly influence individual vaccination decisions. Measuring such feelings and their distribution in a population is a time-consuming and challenging task. Our objective of the study is to analyze the current sentiment of Covaxin vaccination on social media on Twitter. We have retrieved 4139 tweets posted from March 1, 2021, to March 31, 2021, by the Twitter program interface. Results: Our study results show that 38.8% of the respondents have neutral emotions toward the Covaxin vaccination, 35.4% believe positive, and 25.8% are negative have a negative perception. There was no significant association between tweets sentiments and users (P = 0.1976) at 0.05 level of significance. Conclusions: In the internet age, unsubstantiated vaccine safety concerns, the impact of fast rumors, and misinformation can spread quickly. It's up to policymakers to interpret the general questions as a plausible public reaction. Attempts should be made to combat vaccine misinformation through various platforms, such as newspapers, television advertisement, and social media campaign.

Keywords

• covaxin
• covid-19
• sentimental analysis
• twitter
• vaccination