JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Monitoring public attitudes and opinions regarding the COVID-19 vaccine is crucial for understanding public hesitancy to vaccination and developing effective, targeted vaccine-promotion strategies. Unfortunately, studies on the evolution of people’s perspectives in the context of vaccination among the general population are rare.

Objective:

This study aimed to track the year-long evolution of public opinion and sentiment toward COVID-19 vaccines based on online discussions from January 1 to December 31, 2021. The studied period covers the completed vaccination process in China. Moreover, we compared gender differences in attitudes and perceptions towards vaccination.

Methods:

A total of 54,885 COVID-19 vaccine-related posts by the general public were collected from Sina Weibo. We examined the temporal changes in public sentiment over time and identified three stages along the vaccination timeline. We further identified topics using Latent Dirichlet allocation and explored how public opinion changed across stages. Gender differences in attitudes and perceptions toward vaccination were also investigated.

Results:

Most posts presented positive sentiments (positive vs. negative vs. neutral: 71.6% vs. 21.5% vs. 6.9%, respectively). The average sentiment score was 0.76 for men and 0.71 for women (SD=0.34 vs. 0.35). The overall trends of sentiment scores fluctuated over time. However, the scores showed a weak correlation with the new cases ((R=0.388; P<.01). Significant differences were also observed regarding sentiment scores between males and females (P<.001). Common and distinguished characteristics were found in the topics across the different stages. Furthermore, we found significant differences in topic distribution between males and females in the three stages (X2=267.22 vs. 2125.46 vs. 671.98; P<.0001). Women were more concerned regarding the side effects and effectiveness of the vaccines. In contrast, men paid more attention to the impact of the global pandemic and the progress in vaccine research and development.

Conclusions:

Understanding public concerns regarding vaccination is essential for disease control to reach vaccine-induced herd immunity. This study tracked the year-long evolution of attitudes and opinions on COVID-19 vaccines according to the different stages of vaccination in China. These findings provide timely information that can enable the government to understand the reasons for low vaccine uptake and promote COVID-19 vaccination nationwide.