Social media disinformation campaigns tied to vaccine hesitancy

FILE PHOTO: A woman holds a small bottle labeled with a "Vaccine COVID-19" sticker and a medical syringe in this illustration taken April 10, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic

(Reuters Health) - Social media disinformation campaigns designed to cast doubt on the safety and effectiveness of vaccines are contributing to vaccine hesitancy and a meaningful drop in annual coverage, a new cross-national study suggests.

Researchers examined overall Twitter use per country from 2018 to 2019 in a global database of geocoded tweets, then extracted data on 258,769 tweets related to vaccinations. They measured the sentiment of tweets using the Polyglot Python Library; assessed the aggressiveness of foreign vaccine disinformation campaigns on a 5-point scale with higher scores indicating more intense efforts. They also examined public attitudes about vaccine safety and vaccination rates for 10 common vaccine doses between 2008 and 2018.